[afnog] need to identify low priced but good wi-fi bridge set

[Sunday A Folayan]

I believe BL is referring to the Routerboard 200 Series. The 500 series 
come much cheaper, run much faster than the RB200, and has 3 ethernet 
ports. Please see www.routerboard.com. for details. We played with 10 of 
them at the Tutorials in Maputo.

Here, we (apart from CPE) use them as Access Points. We power them off 36V 
batteries, using power over Ethernet, and rig 3 of 12V solar panels to 
charge the batteries. The boards have a built-in watch-dog timer, which 
just reboots the system, should a configurable internal ping process to a 
designated interface fail. They just run forever. The routers (Yes, they 
are routers) also talk OSPF so you can build a happy mesh of fully 
redundant Access points. They have SNMP support: so mrtg and all its 
cousins will show you nice stats. Lest I forget, they also talk to Radius 
Servers, for customer access control.

I call it the swiss army knife of wireless networking.

Regards ...

Sunday.

>As a service provider who wants as many features for as little money
>as possible I've found the Mikrotick RouterBoard as an excellent
>price/features combination. Besides supporting A/B/G i.e. 2.4/5.1/5.8
>GHz it also provides:
>- bandwidth management
>- proxy (transparent or straight)
>- firewall
>- IPSEC
>- PPTP
>- PPP
>- SSH
>- FTP
>- Hotspot
>- PPPOE
>- DHCP
>- DNS
>- and many others
>
>This allows the same box to fit into many different situations. Which
>means less training for my field techs. We are using it as:
>- point-to-point high speed wireless backhaul
>- in-building client CPE (ethernet PPOE + Firewall)
>- POP Level bandwidth manager
>- Internal VPN to Corporate LAN
>
>I must have about 40 or so of these deployed in various of the above
>settings. So instead of having router+firewall+proxy at a customer's
>presence I stick in one Mikrotik box (the dual ethernet Routerboard
>with full feature software retails at about $450!)
>
>Brian