MikroTik RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD-IN - Reviews

(4.2)

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29.2.2020

I purchased MikroTik RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD-IN (simply referred to as RB4011 in the rest of this review) in an attempt to consolidate multiple devices into one and for the most part it has worked well. However, it's not great at everything and the Wireless is really disappointing.HardwareYou do get a lot of hardware for your money, with a quad-core CPU, 1 GB of RAM, 10GbE SFP+, 10 Gigabit Ethernet etc., Port 10 also supports Passive POE out (which works find with UniFi kit too!). The LED's on the RB4011 are really bright and can light up a house at night. There is no way to turn the LEDs off and I've ended up using some black electrical tape to cover them up.The device is passively cooled and the case works as a heatsink which means it's silent but it does get quite warm. Mine spends most of its time around mid 30 degree Celsius.Getting StartedI simply connected my PC to port 2 on the RB4011 and the router issued an 192.168.88.x address. Using my browser I was able to connect to the RB4011 and begin the basic configuration in WebFig. Out of the box the MikroTik has a couple of quick start options which will give you the very basic config but this device really isn't for beginners and without a basic understanding of routing, switching, DHCP etc. you will struggle to configure this device any further.RoutingThe MikroTik RB4011 a very powerful router with an insane amount of features. The device runs MikroTik's RouterOS and offers several routing features only normally found on more expensive enterprise level products. The routing performance of the RB4011 is great and even ploughing several gigabits per second through it the CPU barely seems to break a sweat. From what I can tell MikroTik's routers are excellent at routing and is one of their strong points.SwitchingThe RB4011 is not going to be great as a switch and if you specifically require wire speed switching you will be better off buying a dedicated device instead. The reason why the RB4011 is not a great switch is because of the use of its 2 x Realtek RTL8367 chips. These chips do not support hardware offloading when you are using VLANs and therefore any switching and inter-VLAN routing is performed by the CPU via one or more bridges. The block diagram for the RB4011 also indicates that ports 1-5 and 6-10 are both connected via 2.5Gbs links back to the CPU so this means you will never be able to achieve full switching speed for all 10 ports.BridgingBe prepared to learn about bridging with the RB4011. For most configuration scenarios, ports and VLANs that you want to route between (including the 2.4GHz and 5Ghz Wireless interfaces) need adding to a bridge which performs software based switching. Although the concept of PVIDs, tagged and untagged VLANs are heavily used with the bridge, the implementation may take a little getting used to and is not as obvious as other products. It does seem to work really well though.Management ToolsThere's a few choices for managing MikroTik devices. WebFig is management GUI built into the device and can be accessed via your browser. WinBox is an external application downloaded from MikroTik's website that provides a multi-window interface for managing the device. There's also an Android app which also allows you to fully manage your device (and looks very modern compared to the other options). Out of the GUI options I do prefer to use WinBox but it does have quite a 'legacy' look about it which can be distracting but it's actually very responsive and feature rich. You will definitely want to learn the CLI on RouterOS which is different to every other router or switch I've ever used and feels a bit more like a programming language than configuring a switch. You can even create scripts to perform certain tasks if required.Logging and debugging toolsI have to say that MikroTik provides much better logging and debugging functionality in RouterOS than I've seen in various other products. I've found the debug logging and build-in tools such as 'Torch' incredibly useful for diagnosing what's (or not) going on, compared to say EdgeRouter and the majority of home products (Netgear, DLink etc.)WirelessUnfortunately for me this is where the RB4011 has turned out to be a bit of a let down. MikroTik's wireless just isn't as good as the competition, which in my case, is the UniFi AP AC kit. I've been running a couple of UniFi AP AC access points for a couple of years now and they were relatively easy to set up, provide decent speeds, decent signal strength and I've not had to touch the config or reboot them for well over a year. With MikroTik you need a thorough understanding of wireless including channel frequency, channel width etc. because setting everything to 'auto' simply doesn't work very well. I would recommend that you specify static channels/widths and will benefit greatly from some Wireless network scanner tools. After getting the Wireless up and running as a regular Bridge AP the initial performance was good (not amazing - 300Mbps compared to 390Mbps on the UniFi) but the real concern was how much the 5Ghz signal strength drops in the next room when compared to UniFi. Often, within 24 hours the 5Ghz Wireless would randomly disappear and all my devices would lose connectivity with nothing in the debug logs to indicate why either. The only way I could get it back was to completely restart the RB4011 which would restore the 5Ghz network but only for a few hours. This seems to be quite common with the RB4011 and there's no obvious solution as of yet, although fingers are pointing at the Qualcomm QCA9984 chip used in the router. I decided to try using CAPsMAN (built in centralised management solution for MikroTik WAPs) to manage the Wireless instead and also threw a MikroTik cAP AC into the mix. Performance was truly terrible if you left CAPsMAN forwarding enabled and it was much improved using Local Forwarding but my max speeds dropped from 300mbps down to 200Mbs. I tried pretty much everything I could and spent ages reading up on forums but the consensus seems to be CAPsMAN is slower. Compared to UniFi the MikroTik wireless performs poorly and the management software is really clunky. I've disabled the MikroTik wireless and gone back to my UniFi in the hope that the poor Wireless performance gets addressed with a software/firmware update.Support/UpdatesMikroTik is not as common as other manufacturers and their support channels do seem much narrower. You will find far less configuration examples online of how to achieve certain scenarios. The forums are also full of people asking questions with either no replies or being blamed for misconfiguration when there are bugs in hardware or software affecting lots of people. For me it doesn't inspire confidence in getting support when I need it and you should definitely consider if that is important to you. MikroTik do release regular updates to RouterOS though with different branches (stable, long term, testing and development) so if you do experience issues there's a chance it will eventually get fixed.It's a decent router with lots of features and technology but the Wireless is really poor and loses a star based on that.Pros:- A lot of hardware for your money- 10GbE SFP+ port- 10 x Gigabit Ethernet ports- Decent performance despite being software based switching- Fanless design so silent in operation- More features and functionality than other products in the same class- Regular software updates with different branches (stable, long term, testing and development)- RJ45 serial port on the rear of the deviceCons:- WiFi performance and stability is poor compared to UniFi- Fairly steep learning curve and unlike anything else- Poor quality switching chips- LEDs cannot be turned off- No USB port for 3G/4G dongle- Serial cable not supplied