MikroTik hAP AC2 test

Published on 17-07-2023
The MikroTik hAP ac² router is already a classic when it comes to its position in the MikroTik offer. It is a solid, efficient, and above all, affordable router with gigabit ports.

The hAP ac² router is interesting for several reasons. It has two radio modules, one working in the 802.11 b/g/n standard and the other working in 802.11 ac, which was quite an innovative solution at the time of its premiere. The device has 5 gigabit Ethernet ports and a USB port. ARM architecture was used.

The latest hAP received a casing already known to us from the AC Lite Tower model. Fortunately, a housing such as in hAP Lite has been abandoned. In retrospect, it was clear that this was the direction in which MikroTik began to follow and newer devices look similar. The housing is black, rounded and made of a satin-like material (it is matte). It must be admitted that it makes a very good aesthetic impression. In addition, we have the option of placing the router vertically or horizontally, thanks to the included stand. The new RouterBOARD can be powered from the jack socket or via the PoE port.





The most important thing, however, is how the hAPa ac² works. Without wasting time on desktop tests, I decided to use the router in our corporate network right away. Several tests were carried out during the process. The first of them was to check the USB port in terms of using it to connect the LTE modem. The E8372H test modem was correctly detected and working properly. It was a hilink modem, so in MikroTik we see it as an LTE interface.



hAP ac² has proven itself not only as a router, but also as a CAPsMAN controller for access point networks. On this occasion, we could also test how the 802.11ac radio module works in practice. Using the 80 MHz channel, it was possible to obtain over 300 Mb/s for downloaded data and nearly 200 Mb/s for uploaded data. On the tested Mackbook Air laptop, most routers with an 802.11ac radio interface showed similar results. The presented network also includes wAP ac, whose performance is similar to the tested hAPa ac². wAP AC has a slightly better range, which is probably due to the use of a stronger antenna.




In this MikroTik we have 4 cores of an ARM processor clocked at 716 MHz. According to tests, the device should reroute close to 2 Gb with a 1500b packet. We can believe it, because during my tests there was no problem with reaching the 500Mb tariff with NAT, and the processor did not even exceed 1/3 of the entire resources.


We also had several VPN tunnels set up during the test, including IPSec, and three internal BGP sessions. We did all this without any problems on this MikroTik. The router did not experience any unexpected faults during extended operation.

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