My key criteria are:
- two 10GigE or two SFP+ ports at absolute minimum, and four to give me the warm fuzzies
- two PoE out ports capable of supporting a modern 4K security camera
- a few more plain GigE ports; PoE not needed for these
- several features in RouterOS
It's that last requirement that has me bugging you all rather than the likes of TP-Link, Aruba, etc. I'm somewhat ambivalent about doing Internet routing with this device, but I do need other RouterOS features even without considering that. I still work from home since COVID-19 isn't "over" here yet, so even here in my home office over this past year, I've had cause to be familiar with things like PIM-SM, VPNs, and 802.1x, which reasonably do not have any place in a SwitchOS level product. One of the reasons I'm getting this switch is to play with such things directly so I can advise my customers from experience rather than read my customer's L3 switch manuals to them. :)
The CRS112-8P-4S-IN would be just about perfect for my purposes if only it had SFP+ instead of SFP.
The SFP+ ports might need more CPU grunt than its 400 MHz MIPS CPU can provide, and I'd like a bit more than that on the GigE side as well in case I decide to make this switch take over from my current Internet border router. Creating a variant of the CRS309 might be a better idea for this reason. My ideal might be called a "CRS308-4P-4S+IN". Add another unpowered GigE port to keep it in the "309" line, if you like. It'd make those that like to have such a port for out-of-band management happy.
It’s the PoE requirement that kept tripping me up. If it wasn't for that, the CRS309-1G-8S+IN would have worked by simply adding several cheap 1000Base-T SFP modules, but I couldn't find any that had 802.3af PoE output. I assume this is because SFP doesn't allow the module to draw enough power for that.
For a time, I considered strapping a RB260GSP to a CRS305, but I rejected that since I didn't want to do without RouterOS on one half of the device. It also offended my engineering nature to burn 2 ports just to get the combined feature set I wanted.
Another option I considered was the netPower 16P even though it'll be used indoors. I could've lived with the pointlessly bulky case and the need to buy a separate power supply for it, but having only 2 SFP+ ports was the last straw for me. If there were an indoor configuration — call it the "CRS318-16P-2S+IN" — I might've decided on it over the CRS328.
All of this brings me to what I've got coming on the UPS truck this afternoon, that CRS328-24P-4S+RM. I'm paying for about 20 GigE PoE ports I will never use, an over-specified power supply for all of those ports, and an oversized case to house it all. I would have been much happier with this proposed "CRS308-4P-4S+IN".
In case you're wondering, the hole I want MikroTik to fill is a small but expected to be growing section of the home LAN market.
PoE is really nice for security cameras, but 24 ports is just plain silly for most homes. Something in the 2-8 range should cover a huge chunk of the home market.
10G links have several good uses in the home today:
- 10GigE copper links are appearing on high-end consumer equipment like high-end iMacs, NAS boxes, and Internet modems
- 10G fiber is good for backbone links to other rooms with their own fan-out Ethernet switches: even if everything's GigE or slower in those rooms, they could combine to swamp a gigabit link back to the core switch