Not really asking how it compares to Calix, but if anyone has tried it.
Mesh systems are appropriate for a small subset of our demographic, except the people who misuse them thinking it will get Internet out to their metal shop building 1000 feet away. But there’s the occasional custom built sprawling house of some guy with money. One of the cable companies here uses Eero, not sure how they remotely manage them, or maybe they don’t. My problem with Calix has always been they don’t seem to really want my business unless I totally drink their Koolaid. They put too many hurdles in the way, and we can’t meet the minimum quantities to use their cloud management. We need something we can use where it makes sense, and buy from regular distribution. For a larger WISP, and one that is going to give every customer a Calix router (including existing customer base with their own routers), it probably makes sense. But I’m really just trying to get feedback from anyone who has used the new Mikrotik product, which I didn’t know existsed. Like most home router solutions from Mikrotik, the price is high, so it makes no sense to suggest I’m looking at it because it’s “free or cheap”. Actually the cheapest solution, if I tell the customer to buy and manage it, is probably the 3-unit Eero system. Since Amazon bought them, they have been aggressive on price. From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Darin Steffl Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2019 10:36 AM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Mikrotik Audience mesh router The audience costs about $160 right now when you get the Calix 844e for much cheaper than that close to $100. Mesh is even less and it's easy for the customer to pair. Plus it's all managed by you in a single management system. 50 cents per month per router. All these other systems people are talking about are more expensive upfront and there's zero management of them that is easy with support behind it. If someone says management is expensive, I say it would take 10 years for the Mikrotik with zero monthly costs to breakeven. That's $60 divided by 50 cents = 120 months or 10 years. So Calix at $100 upfront and $0.50 monthly is way better value than any other managed routers. This is carrier grade gear too better than the wifi on any other managed router, period. 4x4 mu-mimo chipset on 5ghz with great range and reliability. Everything else people are posting cost more with no capability to manage thousands of devices. You could try your own tr-069 platform but that costs labor and money as well. Just pay the man (Calix) for software they already have polished and if you need help, their support is included in what you pay so they will fix it instead of you. Time is money. If you waste your own time doing everything for "free or cheap", you're actually costing yourself lots of money. You don't always need to reinvent the wheel. I have the same thoughts on billing systems when people say sonar, Powercode, Azotel are too expensive. I say they're worth every penny because instead of sinking money into my own system and waiting for something polished, I can just pay these guys for a system that already works and focus on making money by growing. By trying to do everything yourself, you will absolutely cost the company money in hopes of trying to save money. This is why we do our best not to host any servers. Email and file storage is Google, payroll is gusto, billing is Azotel on their servers, phone system is on a vps at Linode, quickbooks online. All of this keeps me from trying to be a server administrator and I can grow our revenue. Sorry to rant and go off topic but I think wisp's shouldn't always try to do what's cheapest or free when many of the paid solutions will help their business grow. Outsource anything that is not your core business so you can be laser focused. On Sun, Dec 15, 2019, 11:01 AM Ken Hohhof <af...@kwisp.com <mailto:af...@kwisp.com> > wrote: I totally missed the existence of this product and apparently the US version is actually shipping. Has anyone tried them out? Typical of mesh systems, it doesn’t have a full complement of Ethernet ports, but 2 is better than 1 like some of the mesh products out there. It’s less expensive than a 4011, but it’s pretty and has easy mesh setup. A 4011 is currently my best Mikrotik family choice for whole home WiFi coverage in large homes, but it’s overkill for most customers, who typically don’t need anything close to 10 GigE ports, the 4011 also gets pretty hot, and it’s expensive. Rarely in customer homes can we run cables to additional routers and use CAPsMAN, and the Mikrotik powerline networking product has been disappointing. Am I missing something about the easy mesh setup? Is this something I could do with hAP ac or 4011 routers if I just learned how? The “Audience” product has two 5 GHz radios and apparently uses U-NII-1 for clients and the upper bands for backhaul between mesh units. I’m hoping since this runs the regular Mikrotik OS that you don’t really have to use a phone and the Audience app to set it up and can just use Winbox from an Ethernet port. That’s something I dislike about most customer purchased mesh systems like Google/Nest or Eero, you need an app on your phone and to set up a Google or Eero cloud account, so it’s not really something our installers are going to want to set up for the customer. -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com <mailto:AF@af.afmug.com> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
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