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Comment by tuatoru | Hacker News Reader

> Just got a new Mikrotik RBwAPG-5HacD2HnD

That's a wireless access point, not a router. Different animal.

For WAPs, I'm waiting for 802.11ax/bd to be more reasonably priced. In the mean time, it's wires for me.

It is a router and WAP. It has two Ethernet ports, one for WAN, one for LAN, both Gigabit. It also has an integrated WAP. You can of course use it just as a WAP, but yes, the default configuration is a router.

It can be used indoor and outdoor, it has PoE if desired and mounting brackets.

But yes, it is a router in the default configuration.

The capabilities of MikroTik devices are kind of inscrutable to those who have never put hands on them. Yes, they can route (in software). Yes, they can switch (in hardware, across most ports, depending on where they attached the switch controller chip). _All of them_. Some will be faster at some things than others, but by and large, all MikroTik devices have approximately the same capabilities (at potentially vastly different levels of performance, but checking the same boxes nonetheless). The key difference between different models are the physical interfaces (number and characteristics of the Ethernet ports, SFP ports, wireless radios). At a software level, RouterOS is basically just Linux with a consolidated and more consistent management interface.

I'd dare bet that the WiFi-radio and 1000BASE-T -ports are indeed not switched, but connected to the CPU, which as stated above looks very much like a router :)

There's sadly no block diagram released for these, which would document the internal topology. I also do not have this exact device anywhere to look this up from.

Thanks, that looks pretty compelling.

It's quite a job to get closer to wire speed with 802.11ax still... Let's assume dual spatial streams and devices that not quite support anything past U-NII-1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels#5_GHz_(8...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ax

This leaves us with 5x20MHz spectrum and while being good netizens we'll leave some of that free for others (and ourselves), so we use just 40Mhz of that.

With the tightest modulation and guard interval even, theoretically, we will acheive at best 573.6Mbit/s simplex and not the best of latency and jitter.

I'm not saying that 802.11ax is not worth the money. I am however saying that getting closer to garanteed Full Duplex 1Gbit/s is hard. And I still have 2.4Ghz-only -devices still in daily use.

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