Big shift in router demand trends over past ten years

Daniel Puchert

Daniel Puchert

Journalist
Staff member
Joined
Mar 6, 2024
Messages
2,163
Reaction score
1,903
Big shift in South Africa's router speeds and features

South Africa's router and customer premise equipment (CPE) market has evolved radically in the past ten years, driven by homes and businesses seeking faster, higher-capacity, and more secure connectivity to serve their heavily increased data demands.

That is according to recent feedback from two of the country's biggest ICT equipment distributors — Nology and Pinnacle.
 
Apogee said:
Not everyone is a network engineer.
Click to expand...

I'm not a professional network engineer myself, but I'm a quick study. I've tried every brand of router out there and Mikrotik is by far the most powerful and flexible option out there if you want to actually know what's going on in your home network and want to squeeze every last bit of performance out of your connection. I just use the Mikrotik for routing, and then I've got 4 Unifi AP's with the controller installed in a docker container on my Synology NAS. It's a great combination.
 
deweyzeph said:
I'm not a professional network engineer myself, but I'm a quick study. I've tried every brand of router out there and Mikrotik is by far the most powerful and flexible option out there if you want to actually know what's going on in your home network and want to squeeze every last bit of performance out of your connection. I just use the Mikrotik for routing, and then I've got 4 Unifi AP's with the controller installed in a docker container on my Synology NAS. It's a great combination.
Click to expand...

Also going Mikrotik in the very near future, been through pretty much every brand of router and setup, but might be biting the bullet and getting a proper Mikrotik setup to compliment my Unifi Wifi setup

Currently running Cudy with OpenWRT
 
deweyzeph said:
I'm not a professional network engineer myself, but I'm a quick study. I've tried every brand of router out there and Mikrotik is by far the most powerful and flexible option out there if you want to actually know what's going on in your home network and want to squeeze every last bit of performance out of your connection. I just use the Mikrotik for routing, and then I've got 4 Unifi AP's with the controller installed in a docker container on my Synology NAS. It's a great combination.
Click to expand...
That's probably why like myself you have decent internet at home.
The power of the Mikrotik router yes- like Linux, puts the power in your hands. Every time my schitty ISP pulls funnies like the micro-outages and denies anything is wrong I can pull out router logs, but it's much more than that. I can VPN into my home network from anywhere in the world, and get a Telegram notification when the IP changes or the link was down previously. So many shiny toys to play with in that box, I don't have the time to scratch the surface
 
Really enjoyed my Asus. Once you flash Merlin, you've got a lot more flexibility than typical consumer stuff but just falling short of of a proper Wrt, which I would still recommend if you need that sort of control, openness and performance. Otherwise, it's mostly plug and play and (in my experience) been rock solid for a simple home.
 
PaulMurkin said:
That's probably why like myself you have decent internet at home.
The power of the Mikrotik router yes- like Linux, puts the power in your hands. Every time my schitty ISP pulls funnies like the micro-outages and denies anything is wrong I can pull out router logs, but it's much more than that. I can VPN into my home network from anywhere in the world, and get a Telegram notification when the IP changes or the link was down previously. So many shiny toys to play with in that box, I don't have the time to scratch the surface
Click to expand...

One thing I love about my Mikrotik is how easy it is to setup a backup LTE connection that automatically failsover when on the rare occasion my Openserve fibre connection goes down. I just have my Huawei B618s LTE router plugged into one of the free ports on the Mikrotik, and then setup a few rules in the config of the Mikrotik. It's so seamless that when the fibre does go down I don't even realise it until I get a notification from my LTE provider that my data bundle is depleting.
 
What we also need to see is mid-entry level devices with 2.5G ports, don't know why you only find it on enterprise equipment.

FTTR I am not so certain about. 1. Consumer electronics don't support this so you would have media converters everywhere and 2. It's simply not needed if you have switches with 2.5G ports.
 
acidrain said:
What we also need to see is mid-entry level devices with 2.5G ports, don't know why you only find it on enterprise equipment.

FTTR I am not so certain about. 1. Consumer electronics don't support this so you would have media converters everywhere and 2. It's simply not needed if you have switches with 2.5G ports.
Click to expand...

If you really want 2.5G you can easily just buy a switch that supports it and then connect the switch to the router. 99% of people who want 2.5G want it for transferring data internally on their home network, not for their actual internet connection, so the router itself doesn't need 2.5G ports.
 
acidrain said:
What we also need to see is mid-entry level devices with 2.5G ports, don't know why you only find it on enterprise equipment.

FTTR I am not so certain about. 1. Consumer electronics don't support this so you would have media converters everywhere and 2. It's simply not needed if you have switches with 2.5G ports.
Click to expand...
Because 99% of home users have no need for it, nor do most consumer products have 2.5G.
 
deweyzeph said:
If you really want 2.5G you can easily just buy a switch that supports it and then connect the switch to the router. 99% of people who want 2.5G want it for transferring data internally on their home network, not for their actual internet connection, so the router itself doesn't need 2.5G ports.
Click to expand...

Yeah..

I recently upgraded my home network because the stuff was many many years old, and contemplated 2.5G stuff, and then went "Hold up, 95% of my traffic is over the interwebs which isn't even 1G so what am I going to get out of the extra spend for 2.5G"

It may be nice for shunting data around my local network, but not entirely sure it would have been worth the premium.
 
ThinkCentre said:
I am running 2 Asus routers configured as mesh system and works quite well. I had a Mikrotik and it broke.
Click to expand...
I've had 2 Asus routers as well, 1 premium and 1 more mid-range, very solid performance, unfortunately the premium one died when Eskom was doing Eskom things back before I had a mini-ups attached, but I'd gladly have Asus again (currently on the freebie that the new ISP gave me, Ruijie/Reyee, seems ok, but I have some doubts about it ...)

only mikrotik I ever had was with an ancient fixed wireless connection and it was not running the home WiFi so wasn't really being pushed very hard, it never failed at least

Zurg said:
Both are trash.
Click to expand...
then which router brand is not? and for the love of all that is good don't say TP-Link or huawei / xiaomi / zte, they're all worse than Asus by far
 
deweyzeph said:
If you really want 2.5G you can easily just buy a switch that supports it and then connect the switch to the router. 99% of people who want 2.5G want it for transferring data internally on their home network, not for their actual internet connection, so the router itself doesn't need 2.5G ports.
Click to expand...
Seems things have changed on the switch front then, which is good. 12 months ago, 2.5G switches weren't a thing here, or were prohibitively expensive at the time.
 
While all in one devices are convenient you should have them segregated and use AP's instead.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter