Quality control doesn't look great based on some of the reviews stating DOA's. I also can't see any well known companies selling this particular brand either?
In terms of the interworking I do have some concerns around roaming and hand off between the Home Hub and WAP. I know I've tried things like this in the past and the hand over between WAP's of different brands never seems to work very well. The most stable setups seem to be either the complete WiFi packages or mesh systems made up of the same WAP's (such as Ubiquiti).
Am I just doing things wrong?
Thanks again!
The only reviews I can find are on Amazon, so I'm assuming you mean that because 3/10 reviews stated the unit was DOA there must be an issue with all the units. You can find similar DOA stories on the Ubiquiti forums. Ubiquiti are still replacing US-16-XG units because the 10GBaseT ports didn't work on the first 4 board revisions but they continued to sell them anyway.
The reason you don't find too many people selling Mikrotik is that to become a Mikrotik Distributor you must have a Mikrotik consultant on staff, and I think that master resellers have to run training as well. That means they have to pass ALL the exams at 75% or better. And the Mikrotik exams are not that easy. If you want to resell Ubiquiti you just have to agree to take container quantities from China. So you can contact a Ubiquiti reseller and say that 'it doesn't work' and they'll just say 'OK, that's bad'. Contact a Mikrotik reseller and they should be able to talk though how to set it up properly.
You asked for a cheap access point. The cAP Lite is £26.50 or something like that. I know that there are users on these forums that would say 'save up for a Ubiquiti system' and they might be right.
Ubquiti isn't usually a mesh system (although it can be), it's just that they have a good system for handling hand-offs between access points.
In my initial post I said, if you want easy, go with the BT system. If you want really cheap, go Mikrotik. If you go into Mikrotik ownership with realistic expectations then you'll be happy. It would be better to get two cAP Lites and turn off the BT WLAN altogether and that might be an option in future. The one upside is that on the Mikrotik every possible option is exposed in the user interface so if you want to soft-kick users at -50dBi RSSI, you can. You won't be able to access that sort of feature on the Home Hub.
