MikroTik WiFi 5 Router

<b>WARNING!! You MUST update your RouterOS on arrival for 5GHz WiFi to function correctly!!! </b> Up until a recent 2020 update to the RouterOS firmware; this had a serious flaw on the 5Ghz interface which caused an interface crash and complete failure until reboot, often within ~24h of use. This is now fixed, but you must update your RouterOS on arrival... and for security reasons of course. Originally gave this 4 star due to poor WiFi range and performance, but turns out that's limited to the 2.4G channel and manually tuning the 5G channel can give much better performance, so back up to 5 star!! PRO: - Very good price/perofmance for any modern routing tasks - Proper 10G SFP+ to a high power CPU, great for a RoaS and stateful firewalling - RouterOS allows you to make full use of the hardware and optimise it accordingly - Higher quality feel and looks over older versions (visuals are important!!!) CON: - Poorer switch chips with no VLAN hardware offloading :'( - No cool 'extra' feature like the 3011 and 2011 - Poor WiFi was a con but upon further manual tuning its great now! Notes: - The case top is a <i>direct heatsink</i> to the powerful CPU! Expect the case to be too hot to touch all the time - Requires actual knowledge of networking to optimise for your environment - The PSU LED is STUPIDLY bright, you'll need tape over it if it's in an office (seriously) - To make use of WiFi propery, you'll need to manually tune it This is a bit of a strange device since its name hints it's the newer version of the 3011 and thus 2011... but these 4011 routers, wifi or not, seem to be aimed at a different market. It lacks both the LCD and Bleeper. It no longer supports hardware offloading, and doesn't have a USB port anymore... This now seems to be more focused on being a very powerful router <i>without</i> fancy features and no longer cares about being a switch either. <b>Router performance</b> Brilliant. The CPU and overal design and internals make this a powerful router at a good price. RouterOS provides a lot of features available by default which may have otherwise require a higher price point. If you're new to ROS, good luck... but there's plenty of guides online. Make use of both help.mikrotik.com and the MikroTik wiki as right now the documents are being updated and transfered to the Help site, but not everythings there yet (mid 2020). <b>Switch performance</b> It looses a half-star here. The switch chips (2x RTL8367) do not support hardware offloading, thus will not achieve line-speed VLAN filtering. No only that but the pipes from these chips are limited to 2.5Gb/s throughput to CPU. This will not be a problem for RoaS setups (make use of that full 10G SFP!) but if you're using this as an all-in-one router and switch <i>with VLANs</i> you may see slower than expected throughput, as well as an awkward time figuring out VLANs if you haven't done this before on ROS v6+ router with bridges. I'd personally recommend just using seperate bridges per 'network' unless you do need a faster and larger LAN segregation on denser hardware; in that case it's a RoaS setup with a seperate VLAN aware switch(s) below it I'd say. <b>Software</b> RouterOS is brilliant. You can do almost anything on any device from MikroTik regardless of price point, including rather obscure setups usually only seen in big networks. It's like a Sandbox environment, but it will take time to understand if you're new. Use WinBox for setup as its like a IDE for the device. <b>WiFi</b> I wrote this next section with auto mode enabled... but it turns out if you (properly) scan and tune the WiFi adapters you can re-gain a ton of performance and avoid contamination in most scenarios. <b>2.4GHz</b> On 2.4GHz; If you're going to use this as the only WiFi access point in any building with walls, don't bother. Buy some access points. Even in a house it can only breach 2 or so walls before serious degredation (in my tests; from ~71Mb/s WAN to ~0.7Mb/s 2 rooms away). I'm not impressed at all with the performance, BUT you can gain some performance back by tweaking the default wireless adapter setting to avoid noise and overlap faster by manually scanning yourself, it seems to take a while to figure itself out when left on auto settings anyway. <i>5GHz</i>: MUCH better that 2.4 and when manually tuned. I wrote this review having it mostly on auto and has poor results but manually scanning and assigning frequency ranges seems to have improved performance hugely. The degredation is much less severe and in line with what to expect from a quad chain AN device! <b>"TO LONG REVIEW!! DIDN'T READ"</b> This acts like a "SOHO" version of the previous 3011 device, as in it's more 'professional' with less fun features but overall much more powerful. This is probably the perfect cheap-ish RoaS router especially if you want internal firewalling too as it can hapily grace though rules with fasttrack enabled. It almost looses a star because Wireless seems to want manually tuning to get expected performance and because the switch chips don't support hardware VLAN filtering even though it has 10 1G ether ports and looks like it damn should. ::D

This router is absolutely amazing, the configuration options are incredible. Its not plug and play, you need to be aware that this isnt for someone with little routing/computer knowledge. The router arrived with no configuration at all despite the leaflet with it saying connect to 192.168.88.1 and use the web page. If your is like that download wincap from Mikrotek (free) and connect to the router over a lan cable, then go to system -> reset configuration and do not check anything and then apply, after reboot you can connect as per the leaflet. For more advanced users starting from scratch is probably preferable. I used this as my Virgin Hub couldn't cope with the amount of wireless devices in my home and kept dropping connections. The ability in the Router OS to use your own DNS (in my case pihole) was a plus too. Lots of stuff online about configuring the router os, its been a steep learning curve but so far everything is rock solid and fast with zero disconnects. My router is the international version which came from "Wifi Stock UK" on Amazon (I saw some comments from others that got the US version , presumably from another seller) Brilliant!

excellent router, but I warn you, if you do not have knowledge of the settings of routers, you will have a very difficult time, the router also has a weak wifi but with access point and CAPsMAN roaming i dont have any issues with wifi signal coverage.

I've been using MikroTik since 2013 when I was working in Northern Nigeria and used their routers in a Wide Area Network. Conditions can be pretty harsh and their gear did the business reliably and at a very reasonable price. Their reputation for building quality products is well established with me. Since a MikroTik router's OS is standardized across all models with RouterOS, their router models will vary by hardware appointment. The RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD-IN has 1GB of RAM and support and IPsec Hardware acceleration. I use IPsec VPN constantly for remote-working and can attest there was palpable VPN performance increase from the RB493G this router replaced. In respect to the antennas, really great coverage. My neihbour can see my SSIDs on the third floor of his house. He can't even see his own WiFi network from his router on the ground floor ;-). Been using it for 5 months now and extremely pleased with it. You the price for a router with such chunky hardware and features make this a great value.

I purchased MikroTik RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD-IN (simply referred to as RB4011 in the rest of this review) in an attempt to consolidate multiple devices into one and for the most part it has worked well. However, it's not great at everything and the Wireless is really disappointing. Hardware You do get a lot of hardware for your money, with a quad-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM, 10GbE SFP+, 10 Gigabit Ethernet etc., Port 10 also supports Passive POE out (which works find with UniFi kit too!). The LED's on the RB4011 are really bright and can light up a house at night. There is no way to turn the LEDs off and I've ended up using some black electrical tape to cover them up. The device is passively cooled and the case works as a heatsink which means it's silent but it does get quite warm. Mine spends most of its time around mid 30 degree Celsius. Getting Started I simply connected my PC to port 2 on the RB4011 and the router issued an 192.168.88.x address. Using my browser I was able to connect to the RB4011 and begin the basic configuration in WebFig. Out of the box the MikroTik has a couple of quick start options which will give you the very basic config but this device really isn't for beginners and without a basic understanding of routing, switching, DHCP etc. you will struggle to configure this device any further. Routing The MikroTik RB4011 a very powerful router with an insane amount of features. The device runs MikroTik's RouterOS and offers several routing features only normally found on more expensive enterprise level products. The routing performance of the RB4011 is great and even ploughing several gigabits per second through it the CPU barely seems to break a sweat. From what I can tell MikroTik's routers are excellent at routing and is one of their strong points. Switching The RB4011 is not going to be great as a switch and if you specifically require wire speed switching you will be better off buying a dedicated device instead. The reason why the RB4011 is not a great switch is because of the use of its 2 x Realtek RTL8367 chips. These chips do not support hardware offloading when you are using VLANs and therefore any switching and inter-VLAN routing is performed by the CPU via one or more bridges. The block diagram for the RB4011 also indicates that ports 1-5 and 6-10 are both connected via 2.5Gbs links back to the CPU so this means you will never be able to achieve full switching speed for all 10 ports. Bridging Be prepared to learn about bridging with the RB4011. For most configuration scenarios, ports and VLANs that you want to route between (including the 2.4GHz and 5Ghz Wireless interfaces) need adding to a bridge which performs software based switching. Although the concept of PVIDs, tagged and untagged VLANs are heavily used with the bridge, the implementation may take a little getting used to and is not as obvious as other products. It does seem to work really well though. Management Tools There's a few choices for managing MikroTik devices. WebFig is management GUI built into the device and can be accessed via your browser. WinBox is an external application downloaded from MikroTik's website that provides a multi-window interface for managing the device. There's also an Android app which also allows you to fully manage your device (and looks very modern compared to the other options). Out of the GUI options I do prefer to use WinBox but it does have quite a 'legacy' look about it which can be distracting but it's actually very responsive and feature rich. You will definitely want to learn the CLI on RouterOS which is different to every other router or switch I've ever used and feels a bit more like a programming language than configuring a switch. You can even create scripts to perform certain tasks if required. Logging and debugging tools I have to say that MikroTik provides much better logging and debugging functionality in RouterOS than I've seen in various other products. I've found the debug logging and build-in tools such as 'Torch' incredibly useful for diagnosing what's (or not) going on, compared to say EdgeRouter and the majority of home products (Netgear, DLink etc.) Wireless Unfortunately for me this is where the RB4011 has turned out to be a bit of a let down. MikroTik's wireless just isn't as good as the competition, which in my case, is the UniFi AP AC kit. I've been running a couple of UniFi AP AC access points for a couple of years now and they were relatively easy to set up, provide decent speeds, decent signal strength and I've not had to touch the config or reboot them for well over a year. With MikroTik you need a thorough understanding of wireless including channel frequency, channel width etc. because setting everything to 'auto' simply doesn't work very well. I would recommend that you specify static channels/widths and will benefit greatly from some Wireless network scanner tools. After getting the Wireless up and running as a regular Bridge AP the initial performance was good (not amazing - 300Mbps compared to 390Mbps on the UniFi) but the real concern was how much the 5Ghz signal strength drops in the next room when compared to UniFi. Often, within 24 hours the 5Ghz Wireless would randomly disappear and all my devices would lose connectivity with nothing in the debug logs to indicate why either. The only way I could get it back was to completely restart the RB4011 which would restore the 5Ghz network but only for a few hours. This seems to be quite common with the RB4011 and there's no obvious solution as of yet, although fingers are pointing at the Qualcomm QCA9984 chip used in the router. I decided to try using CAPsMAN (built in centralised management solution for MikroTik WAPs) to manage the Wireless instead and also threw a MikroTik cAP AC into the mix. Performance was truly terrible if you left CAPsMAN forwarding enabled and it was much improved using Local Forwarding but my max speeds dropped from 300mbps down to 200Mbs. I tried pretty much everything I could and spent ages reading up on forums but the consensus seems to be CAPsMAN is slower. Compared to UniFi the MikroTik wireless performs poorly and the management software is really clunky. I've disabled the MikroTik wireless and gone back to my UniFi in the hope that the poor Wireless performance gets addressed with a software/firmware update. Support/Updates MikroTik is not as common as other manufacturers and their support channels do seem much narrower. You will find far less configuration examples online of how to achieve certain scenarios. The forums are also full of people asking questions with either no replies or being blamed for misconfiguration when there are bugs in hardware or software affecting lots of people. For me it doesn't inspire confidence in getting support when I need it and you should definitely consider if that is important to you. MikroTik do release regular updates to RouterOS though with different branches (stable, long term, testing and development) so if you do experience issues there's a chance it will eventually get fixed. It's a decent router with lots of features and technology but the Wireless is really poor and loses a star based on that. Pros: - A lot of hardware for your money - 10GbE SFP+ port - 10 x Gigabit Ethernet ports - Decent performance despite being software based switching - Fanless design so silent in operation - More features and functionality than other products in the same class - Regular software updates with different branches (stable, long term, testing and development) - RJ45 serial port on the rear of the device Cons: - WiFi performance and stability is poor compared to UniFi - Fairly steep learning curve and unlike anything else - Poor quality switching chips - LEDs cannot be turned off - No USB port for 3G/4G dongle - Serial cable not supplied

I really like the setup and documentation on the device, the Wi-Fi is outstanding and much faster than my ISP's hub (Virgin Media hub 3). No problems at all, please note to any new comers to not disable the bridge otherwise you will have to reset and follow the documentation to re-input the default config (https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/First+Time+Configuration#FirstTimeConfiguration-ConnectingtotheRouter) and to also read on how to secure it (https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/Building+Your+First+Firewall). The reset process is straightforward when powering on you hold the button until the LED starts flashing and let go. Connecting to the router is explained on the sheet, simply change your gateway IP to 192.168.88.1 and ensure the netmask is 255.255.255.0 and your IP is set to 192.168.88.2 (2-255).

I start to understand why Mikrotik is so rare despite all the features packed in their boxes. The first retailer i tried was so lame they could not ship the device for 3 weeks. Then i received a faulty router. Once it's been replaced the new unit does not have a power lead in the box. I had high hopes for this device based on some of my friend's experience. So far I'm far from happy.

Use it with a Ubiquiti AP