You know... I put a wired MT in the back room where our hub is, and a
unifi WAP in the center of the house, and we never seem to have problems
here.
I've got a buddy that lives in town, and he has gone through a half
dozen or so different Linksees, dleenks, and so on, and this morning he
is asking me for a "recommended router". I'm inclined to set up what we
have, so I can stop listening to his whining. (He's not on our service,
he's on the evil empire's network).
bp
<part15sbs{at}gmail{dot}com>
On 1/1/2016 9:30 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
I'm seeing a gradual increase in customers leasing a managed Mikrotik
from us, we charge $5/mo for a RB951G-2HnD which has been very trouble
free for us once we tweak a couple WiFi parameters. I think they look
at the pile of discarded routers in their closet and decide to let
someone else deal with it. Most still fall into either the "I can buy
one at Walmart for $50" camp or the "I like going to Best Buy and
letting the sales guy talk me into the $250 router because I like
shopping for expensive toys" camp. And people still look at the
humble little white Mikrotik in its plain brown box and think it can't
possibly match their big black AC1900 router that looks like a weapon
from Star Wars.
The question I guess is whether to join the cable/telco crowd and
supply the WiFi router and manage it for no additional revenue, and
then what to do about the people who still want to put their own Star
Wars router behind it.
It is very disappointing that since Belkin bought Linksys they are now
designing their own Linksys branded routers that are far worse than
the Linksys designed E series which certainly had their own problems.
I replaced a customer's Belksys AC1900 router with a Mikrotik this
week and they went from having total dead spots in parts of their
house on both 2.4 and 5 GHz to having full bars and great performance
everywhere including the basement. Their minds were boggled at this
little white box with no external antennas blowing away the big black
monster.
Of the household brands, Netgear doesn't seem all that bad, except
their low end WNR2000 has a really high failure rate. I see people
starting to trend toward less known brands like Asus and TP-Link. But
too many of my customers think the electronics store is "Walmart" and
they seem to come back with these Belkin pieces of crap, I
particularly hate the model that only has 1 LED on the whole router
and you have to interpret the color and number of flashes, it's like
figuring out what R2D2 is saying. What's that R2? No link on port 3?
-----Original Message----- From: Simon Westlake
Sent: Friday, January 01, 2016 11:04 AM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] OT - bad dream
I've honestly given up completely on all residential routers, they seem
to be slowly converging on a common denominator which is that none of
them work properly and only last a few months. I had to replace my
router recently, and just got a Mikrotik instead. One of the guys I work
with just replaced his old Linksys with a Mikrotik, and all of his minor
problems went away.
I used to think that it was a bad idea to provide managed routers to end
users, but I'm slowly changing my mind after realizing how many issues
are caused by them. There's also a lot you could do to provide better
service to an end user, hypothetically.. let's say you put in a DD-WRT
or Mikrotik router and setup some shaping on the client side with SFQ.
They'd probably see a lot less issues with their Netflix buffering when
their Xbox was downloading a game, or their VoIP cutting out when
they're watching Daredevil in 4K.
On 1/1/2016 10:05 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote:
I had a bad dream where all my customers go to Walmart and buy Belkin
routers. I tried to wake up but I wasn't dreaming.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!
