It is basically CAPsMAN, preconfigured with one-button setup of the CAPs. Each Audience (RBD25G) has 2 GigE ports so you could tweak the CAPsMAN config a little and use cabled backhaul. But you might want to use a different Mikrotik router like a 4011 or an hAP ac for the main router so you have more wired ports. You would also need to develop a standard config and maybe some scripting for that config. I'm not sure you could duplicate the one-button setup with the WPS/Sync button. Maybe the CAPs could be configured before sending them out so that customers could just plug them in. I think Mikrotik was trying to duplicate the experience with the Calix 804Mesh, although I think Calix also has LEDs to help the customer choose where to put the extender.
Someone more familiar with CAPsMAN could give a better answer. To be honest, CAPsMAN is too complicated for my feeble brain. I guess if we paid someone to come up with a standard config we could load into each router, we could take it from there. But the complex manual setup has kept me from using CAPsMAN before. With the Audience mesh units, they basically come out of the box already set up, except for the WiFi password. But we can use Winbox on Eth1 and Quickset > Home Mesh to set them up. The only thing I had to do manually was auto upgrade so the CAPs manager would automatically upgrade the firmware on the CAPs, and maybe I was making it more difficult than necessary due to ignorance. One thing, if you used wired backhaul, you could repurpose the second 5 GHz radio for client connections. So you would have one 2x2 and one 4x4 5 GHz radio plus the 2x2 2.4 GHz radio. Not sure what that buys you in terms of features or performance. From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of David Coudron Sent: Wednesday, December 18, 2019 8:23 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Mikrotik Audience mesh router Thanks for the post Ken, We have quite a bit of interest in those. We have been looking at the Calix as well, but as discussed here earlier, we aren't quite ready to jump into yet another piece of management/operations software. Maybe when we are larger as it seems like the Calix is a good solution, but for now we really like the idea of the Mikrotik as we have a pretty deep investment in Mikrotik already and can manage them with existing tools. We'd love to hear your thoughts on: * Any other software tools needed, or does Winbox and SNMP do the trick for managing and monitoring * Does the throughput measure up to others. We have tested Netgear Orbi and Amplifi. The Amplifi is impressive, but no remote management is a deal breaker * What happens to throughput if you string three of them together * Can you (we are assuming you can) extend the network using cabled backhaul as well as wireless Regards, David Coudron From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com <mailto:af-boun...@af.afmug.com> > On Behalf Of Ken Hohhof Sent: Wednesday, December 18, 2019 7:23 PM To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group' <af@af.afmug.com <mailto:af@af.afmug.com> > Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Mikrotik Audience mesh router I got 3 of them to play with. So far, so good. I have no complaints about the aesthetics, it's a nice looking unit. It would look even nicer if it wasn't so expensive. Still need to evaluate WiFi performance in a large house. They made the mesh backhaul 4x4 MIMO so apparently they want that to be really robust. There's a website with photos of the insides: https://mikrotik-routeros.com/2019/10/mikrotik-audience-review-and-teardown/ I expected it to get hot or for hot air to be coming out of the top, but no signs of that at all. RB4011 gets quite warm, but it has the CPU clocked much faster, plus it has all those gigabit ports. From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com <mailto:af-boun...@af.afmug.com> > On Behalf Of Dennis Burgess via AF Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2019 12:43 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com <mailto:af@af.afmug.com> > Cc: Dennis Burgess <dmburg...@linktechs.net <mailto:dmburg...@linktechs.net> > Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Mikrotik Audience mesh router We have sold quite a few of them and currelty have stock on them. They are a tri-band radio system, so meshing is fairly easy plus no slowdown on the repeater nodes. 99% of them work quite well with one, if you need another just add it and it has an auto connect process as long as you don't change too much. Dennis Burgess, Mikrotik Certified Trainer MTCNA, MTCRE, MTCWE, MTCTCE, MTCINE, MTCSE, HE IPv6 Sage, Cambium ePMP Certified Author of "Learn RouterOS- Second Edition" Link Technologies, Inc -- Mikrotik & WISP Support Services Office: 314-735-0270 Website: <http://www.linktechs.net/> http://www.linktechs.net Create Wireless Coverage's with www.towercoverage.com From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com <mailto:af-boun...@af.afmug.com> > On Behalf Of Ken Hohhof Sent: Sunday, December 15, 2019 10:01 AM To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group' <af@af.afmug.com <mailto:af@af.afmug.com> > Subject: [AFMUG] Mikrotik Audience mesh router 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.
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