MikroTik Gigabit Ethernet Smart Switch with PoE-Out and RouterOS L5 (CRS112-8P-4S-IN)

I have had this switch for many months, and so I have had a lot of time to give it a good test out. I purchased this unit as it had the right feature set and at the right price (or so I thought); I wanted a small manageable switch, with POE.First of all; if you have POE devices that need 48V, you need to purchase another power brick. The brick that comes with this switch does not output the required voltage, and neither does the switch step up the voltage. To make this switch useable for POE+, you need to buy the MikroTik 48V2A96W to go with it which at the time was another £41.00. I was fully aware of this at the time of purchasing, and did buy the additional power brick; though I think it should be an option when purchasing to eliminate waste.Secondly; if you want to do anything beyond just using it as a dumb switch, even things as simple as VLANs, forget it. While it technically can to it, the switch chip on this unit does not support it and so the processing is offloaded to the main CPU, which is weedy. Allocating a single port to a VLAN had a massive performance impact; I would have expected to pass traffic at near wire-speed, but no...throughput drops to about 360Megabits.In conclusion;Mikrotik is well known for making products with good bang for the buck. Every company releases the odd lemon, and this unit certainly is one of those.This switch boasts a great feature set, but does not have the horsepower or right hardware inside to support those features properly. With a decent switch chip, or a processor with some grunt, this switch would be a great piece of kit and at a great price (even taking into account having to buy the extra power pack for POE+). If you do connect any devices to this switch that are passing tagged traffic, it will pass those tags untouched like any other switch, but then that means this is essentially a "dumb" switch with POE; and at £183 (at the time of purchase and with the extra power brick) that is a lot of money.As this unit is really only any good as a "dumb" switch, I would go so far as saying this switch is unfit for purpose and should be withdrawn from sale. If I could, I would be sending this one back.

We have been using some Mikrotik switches in places where we normally would have used something from Ubiquiti lately after having some issues with Unifi gear in our last few deployments. These take some getting used to, but they seem to be reliable enough and they have lots of non-blocking throughput.Only issue with this unit is that it is marketed as a POE switch, but won't really run any modern POE devices unless you buy the 48VDC PSU, which is like $80 or something. So you can add another hundred bucks to the price of these small Mikrotik switches if you actually need them to work.Can't go wrong with Cisco, but for like, 1/10 the price, Mikrotik gear can usually be made to work.

Does not even come close to the speeds they advertise. I had to pull it out due to poor performance.

Does it's job and does it well. It didn't care what kind of SPF modules i plugged in, they just worked.