UniFi or Mikrotik

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Till the end of the month I have to make a decision on whether our university’s WiFi will go on with Mikrotik or move to Ubiquiti UniFi.

So far Ubiquiti’s score

  • WLAN controller
  • compact device w/great radio
  • no firewall available for each AP (no traffic filtering can be done on AP itself)
  • no SNMP

Does anybody know what is the perspective of Mikrotik WLAN Controller / Ubiquiti “advanced features”? Who do you think will add the missing features?

2

Unifi’s do have SNMP (although it is a little wonky)… And 802.11ac and multilane, etc…

As far as negatives for them… Their web interface/controller running in Java is really goofy. Sometimes it causes my APs to randomly reboot (ALL OF THEM AT ONCE), v3 has been in “beta” with no signs of leaving, and they use passive POE instead of the standard… also with their web interface you have minimal to no control per AP… and making ANY changes to anything seems to cause the APs to “PROVISION” and reboot (I have no idea why it is necessary to reboot the AP to change the SSID).

The downside of the MikroTik solution is that it isn’t out yet so its hard to really give a good review of it. But upsides of MikroTik is that each AP will have a web interface, data, good SNMP, firewalling, routing, advanced features per AP.

Personally I am really looking forward to when the MikroTik controller is out to play with… should be pretty awesome.

My early morning $0.02.

3

We recently bought 3 UniFis with AC support. No problems at all. Works like a charm. It’s generally solution to install and forget. MikroTik’s solution looks very promising, but when it will be available, how stable will it be, and what will be HW requirements for Controller.