05 April 2018

This year MikroTik surprised us by announcing a lot of new switches. This was quite unexpected for us in PG Net Pro.

Here is a brief list of the introduced switches:

• CRS354-48G-4S+2Q+ in two versions – with and without PoE on all the 48G ports, also for the first time we see 40G QSFP on MikroTik device;
• CRS305-1G-4S+IN is a very small device, but with 10G ports;
• CRS309-1G-8S+PC is a quiet switch with 8x 10G ports.

There will be two new multiple port SFP switches:

• CRS328-4C-20S-4S+RM;
• CRS332-32S+RM.

You can check the MikroTik presentation from the MUM for more details.

There were several more interesting news from MikroTik:

- They have finally announced the range for LHG 60G – it is 1.5km.

- A nice small device the first of that kind is the PWR-Line AP, a powerline device with an Ethernet port and built-in 2.4GHz AP.

- We also want to mention the new mANTBox2 12s, which is a perfect solution to cover on 2.4GHz outdoor spaces like pools, gardens etc.

We will continue to follow the news from MikroTik…

03 December 2016

In the past several months MikroTik are constantly updating their popular products by equipping them with better/newer wireless and/or CPUs and other improvements. They have just published on routerboard.com the new CCR1009 models, which have some interesting changes:

No switch-chip - all Ethernet ports are directly connected to the CPU, no more shared 1Gbit to the CPU for switched ports. We see it as an improvement, because on devices of that class it doesn't make sense to waste ports for switching, now we have more equal ports to be used at full potential.
Combo-port - a software interface that has two hardware ports: SFP cage and Ethernet port. You can choose which one to use, or use them both to create a very interesting setup - hardware fail-over. That combo port comes with "C" in the product naming.
100Mbps SFP modules support - the first MikroTik device that supports 100Mbps SFP modules. Yes, that is not an upgrade but update, which can be convenient in some cases.

Other products recently updated:
The hAP ac lite now is available with tower case - compared to the hAP lite's tower case, we have an improvement in the design - the case has detachable base which allows horizontal or vertical standing position and wall mounting!
hEX - the revision 3 comes with dual core 880MHz CPU, 256MB RAM and hardware AES for IPsec (you can take a look at our article "Affordable router with hardware AES")
cAP and mAP now have 650MHz CPU (was 400MHz) and Dual-Chain wireless with higher power (was Single-Chain)
OmniTIK 5, QRT 2, SXT 2, DynaDish, SXT HG5 ac, SXT 5 ac, SXT SA5 ac and SXT Lite5 ac were also updated.

02 December 2016

Since MikroTik brought out the Cloud Router Switches, there were many complains about missing functionality, especially regarding (R)STP. The spanning tree protocols are widely popular to create a loop-free redundant Layer 2 infrastructure, so it's something everyone expects to be supported by all smart switches. For a very long time the CRS series did not support (R)STP, but here's the good news - since RouterOS 6.38rc2 MikroTik added stp functionality for CRS (and also for the small switches on the RouterBoards). There's a good example about that on the wiki: http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:CRS_examples#Spanning_Tree_Protocol

It's still not in the current RouterOS release (6.37.3), but we were eager to see it live, so we tested on 6.38rc38 using that topology:



After adding the master port to a newly created bridge with RSTP, all the ports appeared there like expected - they're not part of the bridge, but just shown there to show STP status, the traffic is not passing through the CPU.



We can only say: Thank you MikroTik and keep up the good work!