Need an advice on Mikrotik + Ubiquity set up for home network.

[netto99]

Hello
Our family have just moved in a new house, and we've found that our old Virgin media hub 2ac has very poor coverage. It is placed downstairs in the living room and the signal in kitchen which right next to it is ~-80dBm, which is quite bad according to some online sources. But practically it causes Roku to constantly buffer or drop channels completely. The story is pretty much the same in all other rooms apart from living one. In the same room signal is ~-40dBm. Even positioning Hub in the middle of the house on second floor things are not much better.

So I was thinking about possible solutions to this problem. One of which would be to get Netgear R7000 and use Virgin Hub as modem. Looking through reviews I've found that people either say it’s really good, really bad (with only 90 days tech support), or just a joke compared to MikroTik routers.

So having looked at MikroTik range I've found RB2011UiAS-2HnD-IN which has really good review about its performance and durability, but it only has 2.4GHz Wi-Fi (which is not very future proof). Yet it costs 2/3 of R7000, and if by spending the same amount of money on MikroTik router and a separate Wi-Fi AP from say Ubiquiti would gain me much greater performance than just getting mainstream, overpriced, and overhyped gimmick, I am all up for the trouble of setting them up.

Personally I have a bad history with Netgear, routers were constantly overheating and rebooting, so I’d rather avoid them.

And so I wonder, is Mikrotik RB2011UiAS-2HnD-IN + UniFi AP AC LR a good choice?

 

[microchip]

I can't answer your questions on Mikrotik or Ubiquity but I personally own the R7000 and although I don't use the stock FW which I must admit is too basic and has a lot of issues for my use case, I can tall you that when using it with the XVortex FW, it has been nothing but stellar in both performance and range

 

[Nullity]

If you only have casual experience with computer networking, MikroTik might be quite a pain to setup. Otherwise, your choices seem fine.

Unless you need the advanced features the MikroTik & Ubiquiti products offer, I would say just get normal consumer stuff like Asus, TP-Link, etc. Really though, either of the options you pose are good options.

 

[netto99]

Thank you for your replies

I'm sure R7000 is a spectacular piece of equipment right now. But would it be the same after one year? Or ten? If I could build a system that would cost just as much as R7000, be just as powerful, however be a lot more reliable (at least that is what I've heard about Mikrotik and Ubi) then it is illogical to do otherwise in my opinion.

Yes, Mikrotik is not very user friendly, but I'm up for it ))

 

[System Error Message]

depends on the throughput you want. for 100Mb/s they have many inexpensive MIPS based routers that can do it with lots of configs. Go for their recent models though not the very old ones.

If you want to use both mikrotik and ubiquiti i suggest getting a mikrotik router to use as a router and a ubiquiti AP.

The RB2011 is actually old and their hex routers are newer and faster.

 

[Nullity]

Thank you for your replies

I'm sure R7000 is a spectacular piece of equipment right now. But would it be the same after one year? Or ten? If I could build a system that would cost just as much as R7000, be just as powerful, however be a lot more reliable (at least that is what I've heard about Mikrotik and Ubi) then it is illogical to do otherwise in my opinion.

Yes, Mikrotik is not very user friendly, but I'm up for it ))

The only time I see any complaints about Asus or any popular routers being unreliable is when people run media-servers or other extra crap on them.

If you are referring to future-proofing being in the favor of MikroTik & Ubiquiti, yeah, maybe, but x86 devices like an Intel NUC or mini-itx board running pfSense or IPFire would be truly future proof. There will always be some modern, updated OS to install on an x86 machine. The same cannot be said for most of those embedded devices.

Though, you will most likely still want a quality AP, which is almost always going to be a separate embedded system (for now).

 

[netto99]

Thank you all for your replies. It have really helped. I think that I'm going to go for hEX + UniFi AP AC LR for my set up.

pfSense on mini-itx sounds too scary even for me I hope that my experience would prove useful to other people looking for alternatives not only in software, but in hardware as well.

 

[System Error Message]

actually even mikrotik and ubiquiti are both future proofing as well as they release OS updates too, its only the throughput that isnt future proof. Mikrotik have hardware with miniPCIe so you can update wifi if ever they come out with a new protocol.

pfsense shouldnt be too scary if you are willing to try out mikrotik.

 

[netto99]

What I've meant by future proof was at least having 5GHz, doesn't need to something extraordinary. Software is more easily updated so I'm mostly concerned with hardware.