Mikrotik Router Experiences

Router has been an essential electronic device required for our internet experiences for quite sometime now. Over the last decade or so it has evolved quite a bit as far as technologies inside this devices are concerned. Just like the computers, it grew in its capabilities and very naturally became more and more complex.

Back in late 90's when I started using the internet using Dial-Up modems. I didn't know what was a router. I didn't share my internet with multiple devices at the same time. It was totally a different way of using the internet at home user level. Luckily the broadband internet showed up along the way and we started gathering more and more internet connected devices thus the necessity of sharing the internet at home became a must. That's exactly how I got introduced to router.

I clearly remember using a Linksys router at home for the very first time. It not only had multiple Ethernet port at the back to connect with more wired devices but also had primitive WiFi technology built into it. Much much later when I got my hands on the Palm TX PDA and Nokia phone, I could have connect to the internet over the WiFi signals. It was amazing as much as it was surprising to me.

Fast forward few decades and now a days Netgear, TP-Link, Linksys etc. are some of the most popular household brand name of router manufacturer to us. What's not a household name is Mikrotik. In fact I didn't even know their name only couple of years back. Somehow Mikrotik is slowly but surely becoming a popular name. I am pretty sure, it was popular among people who were closely related to the Networking Industry.

It's been only few years since I started using Mikrotik products and quite frankly I really liked their products. The operating system that mostly powers the Mikrotik Routers are popularly knows as RouterOS. It is a very powerful linux based operating system designed for routers. You can easily compare this OS as the Swiss Army Knife among all the OS that powers any router. It has features that are generally missing within the routers of other brand devices that were focused for home users for obvious reasons.

Mikrotik makes some of the best and powerful networking devices, no question asked. But their RouterOS is very complex and has huge learning curve for average home users like me. Yet, I took this journey to introduce myself to the Mikrotik products out of tremendous amount of curiosity that I have towards this OS. RouterOS is definitely something that I want to learn and use on any given day, period.

My experience with the RouterOS was bitter sweet. Bitter because I was doing things that I wasn't suppose to be doing. I am no network genius but I was spending hours and hours doing and fixing things that most probably regular home router does by default. Sweet because I could control and perhaps optimize my router as I wished. Can't deny, I have long way to go.