MikroTik

A simple question.. Where is the NV2 on the new AX Units? We really have a lot of older clients and to switch to AX on the whole we are forced to change our backbone first? Have I overlooked something?

Cheers
Jimmy

AX does not support NV2

Sad

Not only that, but the new capsman is not compatible with the older one. So if you have older devices and you buy a new one, you are SOL.

This is really bad for backward compatibility if no NV2 and personally would not be able to replace AP, because we have significant amount of rural clients having long range links to AP, but only functioning acceptable with NV2 enabled. I understand AX does not allow for NV2, but the radios does also support AC and N and i would think it possible to port NV2 at least for these standards that is compattable with NV2. Perhaps Mikrotik could consider this and at least leave a backwards compatibility path?

Not only that, but the new capsman is not compatible with the older one. So if you have older devices and you buy a new one, you are SOL.

Bit harsh, there are two paths you can walk in this use case:

- if only ARM devices involved, upgrade them with the wifi-qcom-ac driver.
- it is possible to run both versions of CAPsMAN. Though this leaves you with two managers, it will work

Perhaps Mikrotik could consider this and at least leave a backwards compatibility path?

Older devices use the MikroTik driver, while AX devices use the manufacturer driver. Hence nv2 is no longer supported.

For more info, search for lost features in the documentation:
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/WiFi

I understand AX does not allow for NV2, but the radios does also support AC and N and i would think it possible to port NV2 at least for these standards that is compattable with NV2.

AFAIK it's not radio hardware in AX devices which is incompatible with NV2, it's drivers issue: on AX devices it's only possible to run new (wave2) drivers, which are essentially drivers created by radio chipset vendor (so far it's Qualcomm only) packaged into ROS ... while on pre-AC radios older wireless driver has to be used and that driver was Mikrotik's in-house development. On AC devices it's mostly possible to choose between both drivers.
And NV2 is Mikrotik proprietary radio standard. Hence it's not realistic to expect chipset vendor to implement it in their (reference) driver. And MT so far declared they won't be doing their own wireless driver development any more.

The experience, published on this forum a couple of years ago, when new wave2 drivers came into life, was that new wave2 drivers perform better in many use cases, including some of which used to mandate usage of TDMA (i.e. NV2). Which means that with wave2 drivers it might be possible to run your long-range rural links on standard 802.11 protocol. But you'd have to test if that's actually true in your particular use case (and on all involved links for that matter).