Hello Mikrotik,
after working several years with ROS and routerboards we had many good times and some bad times with your products. In the past two years I saw that you are disregarding some urgent feature requests of your customers. That means for example CE,ATPC, EU conform DFS, 802.11n. If some of your customer is asking about the features he will hear "We are working about it" or "We have features that are more important". Meanwhile your competitors are able to implement (for example LANCOM) the features are requested by radio-regulation within two month. From my point of view MT is an excelent radio equipment but what shall I do with this equipment if it is illegal to use in EU or will not fullfill the specification (ATPC, DFS2) for using in new markets (EU, 5720-5850 MHz with 4 W EIRP) respectively new long line customers. From my point of view most of EU-ISP's are in the same situation as we are: We are earning our revenue in a small corner of the market in the areas where clasic telecom giants are not able to deliver a affordable service at a payable price. In this market-corner we can only survive if we are cheaper, faster and have a higher quality. We have not a lot of time to waste because the big telecoms are looking for new customers to (for exmaple VDSL)...
Routerboards
You did a good job in the last years in development of routerboards. I wonder why it is neccesarry to change the board size and mounting wholes at nearly every new product. Why isn't it possible to look at some industry-standards (like EURO-CARD) for PCB-Size. The case selection will be much easier.
We don't care if an AP is 50$ more expensive if we can get the functions (temperature and voltage monitoring or GPIO for example) to keep the service-level high and preventing us to drive to location and guessing what problem is making our service unrealible. Is it temperature? Is the voltage to low?. RB230 was able to monitor this values. Newer generations of RB are not able to do that. Why? Is that the result to make the AP-product as cheap as possible. I can't believe that your customers are not willing some cents for the sensors.
Why did you reduce the voltage input range of the AP usable Routerboards (exempt RB600) to non Telco voltage (48V) and POE voltage levels. This is legitimately and usefull for customer CPE but not acceptable for APs running on an Tower with an 48V-UPS.
Wireless funktions
Beside ATPC and DFS(2) your are missing the chances to make your product unique. For example NSTREAM2. Nice but unusable in EU. No one has funktion like this. I personally (looked from your side) I would spend development in an EU legal NSTREAM2. And afterwards I would take a circulator (diplexer) into my product portfolio. Ideal for very long links on high wind loaded towers...
802.11n for outdoor with dual slant antennas is the tool to win against 100M-fibre-connections in city areas. Not possible with MT yet. What should we do? Wait? How long? Or should we change our platform to get the customers now before the are lost forever?
Firewall functionality
The attack scenario has changed. Customers want's to have databased url-filtering and content virus scan? IPCOP can do this. But do I wan't to use IPCOP? No! I wan't to have as least platforms I can get. Are some plans to implement this firewall features (if possible RB support)?
I hope this time, some of you will respond. Please let us not die clueless. So here are my questions:
When will we see ATPC, DFS2?
When is 802.11n implemented and usable?