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Mikrotik Chateau ... first impressions

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Casual Member
2021-07-15 09.11.07.jpg


I suppose I should start off as admitting to a preference and certain amount of fandom for Mikrotik. Since discovering this technically excellent and low priced brand much of our 'other vendor' network infrastructure has been replaced ... by Mikrotik.

This is a few words after spending less than one hour with the Mikrotik Chateau

  • It is quite an expensive product, retailing at just over 200 GBP
  • It is available from Amazon, so if you did not like it, then you could return it easily
  • There are actually 2 versions one with upto LTE12 capability and the 5G version. The latter is over 400GBP and generally unavailable.
  • Mikrotik also did a limited not for general sale, run of LTE18 capable units.
  • It runs full RouterOS, at version 7. Interesting since that is only in beta on every other Mikrotik I know. In fact choosing 'software upgrade' prompts you to install 6.4x. I was not stupid enough to do that.
  • I plugged it in, inserted a 3 telecom SIM from my mobile
  • I had to use Winbox to do in some basic config otherwise nothing would work. In particular: a) changed IP range of the LAN away from the Mikrotik standard 192.168.88.x b) enabled a Wifi Interface and set it up with a decent userid and password and country legal Frequency range c) entered SIM pin so the device could get LTE signal
  • So far I have not tried an external antenna
  • It is off topic but Polyting have some new exciting products coming out. Examples https://poynting.tech/antennas/#type-of-antenna?compare=14919,18760,18761
  • I got 30 Mbps plus speeds which is faster than from my Google Phone, which is the reference super-fast phone I compare everything against
02 lte info.jpg

  • There is a GUI where you can see LTE information. I note no way to set what Primary and Carrier Aggregation band that I can see so far
  • There is a menu to send and receive SMS
  • Obviously? any GUI action has a command line equivalent, e.g. SMS. https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Tools/Sms
  • Since there is a scheduler and programming language I can see that this could send out SMS alerts for certain conditions. Also I'm pretty sure other Mikrotik devices with suitable authentication could therefore use this as an SMS gateway. Mikrotik has a Systems Management product /The Dude/ (that I use also), would be nice to get Dude to send out alerts this way.
  • The device has 5 , Gigabit Ethernet ports. Using Router OS you can join these together as a Bridge or otherwise: the possibilities are pretty much endless
  • As supplied there is a basic Firewall setup, the Mikrotik caveat applies, do a backup before you touch anything, understand what you are doing!
  • URL of product is here https://mikrotik.com/product/chateau_lte12
  • There are 2 Wifi radios 2.4 and 5 Ghz. Uniquely you have control of power, frequency band, and even shape. You'll therefore exceed any possible LTE speed you receive , so WiFi will never be a bottleneck


I will spend at least one week exhaustively testing and will publish a review and put out a link onto this forum .

Thus far, despite the gargantuan cost, I think it will become an indispensable part of our UK home network infrastructure.
 
I wrote the tiny-est of shell scripts to pull a constant load to test out my lovely Chateux (Actually I renamed the hostname to Chapeau just for fun )

cat test4G
#!/bin/ksh

print testing of 4G speeds
print started at $(date)

interval=1
iter=1
while (true )
do

print iteration $iter at $(date)

time wget --no-verbose --delete-after https://releases.ubuntu.com/20.04.2.0/ubuntu-20.04.2.0-desktop-amd64.iso

sleep 5

# rm -f "ubuntu-20.04.2.0-desktop-amd64.**"

(( iter++ ))


sleep $interval
done


So in RouterOS of course you can navigate the GUI to find lots of goodness hence we see a nice graph trundling up to over 80 Mbps. My 3 connection never went so fast, no really!!

1626392133459.png



Next I was poking around hoping for a benchmarking tool (there is no internet one, only machine to machine) but I found a Graphing tool. Who knew? !


1626392351757.png


So I think I can store every 5 mins or hour or daily some graph, in this case I selected LTE1 interface. I cannot wait to see what happens. How exciting, right!

Bet you can't do this sort of thing configurably with Huawei / an.other (You can use LTEH or Inspecteur of course, but it is just not the same)
 
Lovely reporting and router, keep us updated!

Can you confirm whether you can lock cells or bands on this router?
 
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Any ideas where you can buy the 5G version? I can't find any places that sell it.
It's not for individuals, it's for ISPs (customers), but when I asked Mikrotik, they did say they should have some 5G ones for the likes of us, too by the end of the year. Fingers crossed.
 
Lovely reporting and router, keep us updated!

Can you confirm whether you can lock cells or bands on this router?

Just saw this thread and have just received a Chateau 5G.

You can lock cells and bands (I've found that it is through the terminal interface for cells, and bands can be done through the web interface). There seems to be an endless amount of possibilities to configure this. In addition the Chateau 5G can be setup to handle a DSL, a secondary 4G/5G connection via a mobile (connected via the USB port) etc..
 
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