so we asked the customers what they want, and they want small powerfull machines that DON'T LOOK LIKE A Pc...(don't ask me why)
Look on the RouterBOARD product line
The only really disturbing problems I find with RouterBOARD are:
1. It is really low performance platform, especially considering the high CPU usage that MikroTik shows for almost all tasks. What performance could be expected for example on 5GHz backhaul, using nstreme (that is, long distance)? My experiments so far show it can't even support one wireless interface at "full speed"...
2. It does not scale well - there is small number of interfaces that can be installed (available slots and power limits). It forces installations of "one per antena" configuration, and still can't provide sufficient performance.
3. RouterBOARD was dubbed to be good for firewalls, but it really is suitable as an entry-level firewall. Ethernet interfaces are not of the highest performing and RouterOS is not "very" fast on routing... - as an example, I have one RouterOS based router, that has only one Gigabit Ethernet interface [Intel) and shows 30-40% CPU utilization with approx 15 Mbps traffic, this will ip firewall connection tracking disabled (why is it on by default by the way??) - this is on 2.6GHz Pentium 4 - the only firewall rules (less than a dozen) are plain source/destination filters.
Of course, it is not proper to compare it to Cisco routers, but - I cannot deny them one feature - their highest priority task is to route, everything else, including for example response to PING is lower priority - and they do wonders on low-power hardware (in todays terms).
It would be great if MikroTik has sooner higher performance RouterBOARD - the integration and support are wonderful.
I do support the opinion of mag, that more conservative hardware support, with higher performance is prefered. After all, we don't run out desktops on RouterOS.
Daniel