Mikrotik SXT SA5 ac Power over Ethernet (PoE) White WLAN access point - WLAN Access Points (10,100,1000 Mbit/s, 256-QAM, 128 MB, 80 MHz, QCA9882-BR4A-R, QCA9557-AT4A-R)

This has to be one of the worst pieces of equipment that I have ever had the misfortune to buy. Documentation is so bad it's effectively non-existent. Support actually doesn't exist. Your only chance of help is to pay for expensive consultants to come onsite or hope to get a lucky response one of the tiny number of members of the public who are overwhelmed by the flood of problems reported in the forums. Here's my experience: Straight out the box, brand new device. It's a simple router with one ethernet port and one USB port. What can possibly go wrong? From the start absolutely none of the startup methods worked. LED power light light up, testing the USB on a phone there was power throughout the board, but no traffic on the ethernet line (not even attempts at ethernet negotiation) and dead on the USB in console mode. Carefully try all the options, from winbox to netinstall, but nothing can see the device. OK, so maybe a faulty unit. Try contact support, right? You wish! There is absolutely no support. A single email, days later, with the suggestion to try netinstall then nothing. OK so the community is great, right? Nope. The forum that Mikrotik run is useless. No staffers responding and the few members of the public who are doing their best simply cannot cope with all the issues. There is a flood of people needing help. Youtube has a few videos for devices that work, nothing of any help for a brick that is bricked straight out the box. But the most important issue of all is: Why did a faulty networking product ship in the first place? How can quality control be this bad? The "solution" from Mikrotik is to pay for private consultants to come and "fix" the device. The bottom line is that if you are buying this product you are taking a gamble. Clearly some people get lucky and their device works. But if you are unlucky enough to get a brand new brick, your loss. You are on your own with no support. Your only option is to throw the device away and buy another solution from a better brand. If, like me, you need this device for business critical reasons, then I wish that someone had written this review for me to have read before I purchased it. It has cost me dearly. Angry clients, weeks of lost time and a fortune in having to rush in emergency measures to work around this faulty device. Just don't buy it. Move on. Other products are available.