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Comment by donw | Hacker News Reader

Who would you go with?

Juniper for routing. The neat trick with wisps with broken networks is to just drop a big juniper device in their core and edge, and replace 10 mikrotiks and suddenly a large tranche of angry customers just stop calling.

The big questions come at the tower. Juniper doesn't have a massive POE tower switch. The options there can be all bad. Its this huge mess. AC or DC, backup or no backup etc etc. And there are always drawbacks. I had a customer purchase a massive cambium tower switch with all the bells and whistles only for it to occasionally lock up and forward on all ports like a hub. Netonix can be good, however their failure rate is higher than I would like, and the support always tries to blame your grounding on returns. But the interface is easy to teach to junior techs, and other than some weird issues with linux partition size and their vlan implementation they just go. The ubiquiti tower switches are a lot of fun. I dont know if its still the case but for a few firmware versions they had half the config only available in a legacy interface. But once you made a change in the legacy interface, all the labels you set in the new interface are lost.

RF last mile for residentials, Ubiquiti/Cambium. They both work well in some respects and suck in others.

NEC for backhaul if you can get it. Otherwise there are some decent ubnt/cambo options also. ubnt has come a long way in 60GHz.

Ubiquiti can provide everything on his list for wireless. They also sell OLTs and CPE devices if you want to build a smaller fiber network.

If you want real telco stuff look at Edge core or Nokia.

Ubiquiti’s hardware is limited in some respects whereby with Mikrotik you can implement anything, its just a matter of how and the performance. Ubiquiti for core, especially when deploying CGNAT, is a bad idea.

Is there something similar to Ubiquiti's "unified configuration" thing (where you can configure your whole network in a coherent way, maybe even from some gui)?

I love my Mikrotik homelab setup, but it's held together by carefully crafted per-box configs that are not easy to change all together (e.g. adding another VLAN, etc).

Maybe it's just my newbie status at this, but hopefully there's some cool piece of software that I just don't know about yet!

MikroTik is actually mostly configured via a GUI. It's pretty rare to use CLI except to automate stuff.

However, there is only a limited "Quick Settings" option, which supports most basic configurations. For anything more advanced, you do actually have to set it up yourself.

However, the problem with recommending Ubiquiti in the context of an ISP, is that once you hit a wall with it, you are done. You cannot change things that are not supported to be changed, you cannot make it do something it was not "designed" to do.

On Ubiquiti, you can ssh into the VyOS-derived OS on the EdgeRouter (if talking about EdgeOS), but anything you do there cannot be accessed from the webui anymore, and changing anything in the webui will of course destroy what you changed manually over SSH.

At that point, you have an offbrand Linux router that is hindering you, and you either go with MikroTik or upgrade to Cisco equipment. But that Ubiquiti is going on a shelf.

In general, it's quite different running an ISP and running a homelab.

With MikroTik, you can make ANYTHING and everything. And there is no paywall for additional features like some vendors.

Finally, to underline my point, it is required to learn MikroTik's RouterOS before starting an ISP, if you don't want to end up with problems.

Ubiquiti has a prosumer version of everything on an ISPs checklist, but most of it is either too expensive or under featured. Eventually you outgrow it and thats when you face a large expense to get out of it. Other than RF and hardware to support RF that is. Their tower switches are reasonably scalable, and some of their other kit, like FibrePOE is situationally ok.

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