Hi.

I have a task of building a 500+ user network using mesh technologies
The 500+ apartments are located in 62 different buildings.

My plan is to create a backbone of 10Gbit fiber supplying a switch in every apartment staircase with 10Gbit fiber, and supplying all flats with 1Gbit either fiber or rj45.
Internet connection is provided by a 10Gbit fiber, and 5 1Gbit fibers for failover and loadbalancing.

I will end up with 62 switches connected together

How many redundant lines between switches would you plan in such an installation, and which router would you recommend as the main ?

IMO, a cheap Gigabit Multi-WAN router with 2+ WAN ports and at least 2 LAN ports, plus a Gigabit switch per house attached to the LAN port of the router should do the trick. Of course the flats/consumers would be connected to the house switch...
One can of course further cost-optimize, but for this one would need to study the locations of the client houses and of the POP (ie. you as ISP)...
In respect to redundancy: yes makes sense, especially for VIP-like clients...

That seems little to do with help on MT products and more like a networking homework assignment question??
If its general you may wish to ask here for example........
https://www.dslreports.com/forum/network
or if a legitimate business setup and not homework then.....
https://www.dslreports.com/forum/bizdsl

Once you have your design in mind, then perhaps some here can answer what equipment in MT is best suited to your design.

ccspdk, for this application I think a GPEN approach (Gigabit Passive Ethernet Network) can fit as a glove for building distribution to flats and keep costs down so that you can be competitive.

See newsletter and the GPEN concept)

Hi.

I have a task of building a 500+ user network using mesh technologies
The 500+ apartments are located in 62 different buildings.

My plan is to create a backbone of 10Gbit fiber supplying a switch in every apartment staircase with 10Gbit fiber, and supplying all flats with 1Gbit either fiber or rj45.
Internet connection is provided by a 10Gbit fiber, and 5 1Gbit fibers for failover and loadbalancing.

I will end up with 62 switches connected together

How many redundant lines between switches would you plan in such an installation, and which router would you recommend as the main ?

As you are doing this across a pretty large campus-style network I would make sure you have a good fiber design. Make sure you have from each access-switch 2 different path/uplinks. Ideally these would go towards 2 different datarooms and follow separate routes.Between these datarooms make sure you have plenty of fibers.
I don't think Mikrotik has a concept of "stacking" or "vss" (virtual switch system) like found on other vendors,otherwise each larger apartment block could have 1 stack of 2 nodes, each node carry 1 uplink and the ports towards the end-users are distributed across the 2 stacks.

Then you can "uplink" each larger appartment block towards each dataroom/meetme-room and have some connectivity/core design in place.
Then depending on the features of the product you can see how you go further.

I'm working now on such design but we are deploying using Cisco SDAccess ; edge-switches have 2*10Gbps uplinks (vPC) and the border-switches are interconnected with 40Gbps ethernet all using single-mode fibers. This is scaled for thousands of users both wired & wireless, fully 802.1X etc,etc.

This is only 1 approach, many other approaches are possible. Finally it also depends how you will offer the final connectivity to each customer. Using traditional VLAN's would limit you to about 4K "endusers" , but perhaps you want some design where you run a large PPPoE server(s) and all customer connect using PPPoE ? Then there is also the question of security.
Do you foresee for such project that end-users will receive 1 public IP or you want to go with some NAT scenario ?

Regarding redundant number of links... difficult to say, that's something that has to be assessed considering multiple factors, then deciding what shall be the minimum SLA and design them. I remember an specific MUM presentation by fellow trainer Mihai Saftoiu, Fully Redundant Networks (PDF) that may be of your interest and also provide inspiration.

For the Provider Edge Router, I'd consider CCR2004 (just released) or CCR1036.

Going VLAN route doesn't necessarily imply a 4K user limit. You can deploy VPLS and have that VLAN limit on a per VPLS tunnel basis.

This Serve The Home article with a $ per port and per Gbps analysis can help you out in picking the optimal ones for the application.

Well worth the read.

Regarding redundant number of links... difficult to say, that's something that has to be assessed considering multiple factors, then deciding what shall be the minimum SLA and design them. I remember an specific MUM presentation by fellow trainer Mihai Saftoiu, Fully Redundant Networks (PDF) that may be of your interest and also provide inspiration.

Thanks for this link to that video. Indeed very informative and inspirational.
I find the mathematical practical result for a simple redundancy fascinating:
Chance for the downtime of a single ISP link is 1% per month, ie. p=0.01. This means 30 * 24 * p = 7.2 hours per month.
But if one adds another ISP link for redundancy, then the combined probability that both links will be down at the same time
comes down to 30 * 24 * p * p = 0.072 hours, ie. now only 4.32 minutes per month. This means an uptime of (1 - p * p) * 100 = 99.99% per month.