Touring MikroTik in Latvia to See How they Make Awesome Networking Gear

Visiting HansaMatrix Ventspils

While I was there, we took a 3 hour drive (each way) to Ventspils, a port city on the coast. There, we were able to visit the HansaMatrix Ventspils facility.

As an electronics manufacturer, HansaMatrix has a number of facilities, but this one was running MikroTik products on a line that we could tour during our visit. As one might imagine, there are multiple lines servicing several customers, and those lines change over time to keep the factory running.

First, components arrive the receiving dock.

Then those materials need to be unboxed and packaging removed.

After that, there is an inspection point to ensure the components received are good.

Then, materials need to be stored before production is scheduled and then the components make their way to the production floor.

Once production is scheduled, materials are moved to the production floor.

The bare PCBs are brought to a line of pick place machines that take components, often on reels, and then place them precisely on the PCBs.

At each step, photos are taken to ensure that the components were placed in the correct spot.

Something fun was just seeing the lines. There are even machines that turn boards 90 degrees to automate the process.

Then the boards go into the oven to secure the placed components.

Then there are other steps like wave soldering machines to solder the components to the boards.

At the end, the boards need to be precisely CNC machined out so that instead of the larger PCB with many boards, the end result is a single one.

There is also a testing process to sort boards after they are done, and identify any boards that may need rework.

This is done using tools like large optical inspection tools to see if there are any defects during manufacturing.

After the bare boards are turned into working boards, the rest of the product needs to be assembled. This is often done in production cells.

Here all of the materials are brought to stations with the right tools for each assembly step.

At HansaMatrix, there are production cells that do everything from printing and affixing lables with MAC addresses and serial numbers, to loading and testing software on the devices, to putting the housings on the devices to complete them.

Something that would likely go overlooked is that with products like the RDS2216, custom robotic test fixtures are installed. MikroTik’s headquarters team in Riga builds these test fixtures to do tasks like power on the unit, insert drives, and even see if LEDs are working.

Once the products complete their rounds through the production cells, they are then brought to the packing area.

Here, the products get items like power adapters, instruction manuals, antennas, and more.

Eventually, they are boxed up and then palletized.

After that, it is off to the shipping area to eventually go to customers (and also be taken apart by us!)

Key Lessons Learned

There were so many cool things on the trip. One of the neat parts was also how we got the footage transferred from Latvia. The footage was put on a MikroTik RDS2216 server and was downloaded from there. That felt like an appropriate way to share footage from the tour.

Something I was taken aback by was just how many of these were at the MikroTik offices.

I also had the opportunity to chat with John Tully, MikroTik’s CEO several times, including two dinners while I was there. Over a beer I was telling John that the new Broadcom VMware licensing regime has created a lot of angst in the community, and that there is an opportunity for future RDS servers with a a few tweaks. The gentleman next to us at the bar was from San Diego and was lamenting about how big of a challenge VMware licensing was at his work in a large organization. I will just say, that based on what I saw, that the RDS2216 / ROSE line was not a one and done effort.

Also, something that is important is who is John Tully. There are a number of biographies online, but he co-founded MikroTik in 1996, almost 30 years ago. He told me a bit of his story being from Memphis, Tennessee, going to university, and having professors who were working with a precursor to the airBaltic airline that I flew. (As an aside, airBaltic had Starlink WiFi which was awesome!)

While he was there in the 1990s, the Internet was becoming big, but big companies like Cisco were focused on selling to large organizations and VC fueled dot coms. I know a bit about this since in the late 1990’s I spend a lot of time at Cisco with my father who ran the service provider business and Cisco IOS. Conversely, MikroTik was founded to help connectivity for those who did not have deep pockets starting with software solutions that could run on off-the-shelf hardware.

A big part of this trip was really learning if MikroTik is small Chinese vendor. Realistically, it is an European Union networking gear provider where the product definition, design, prototyping, and testing are happening in Latvia. The CEO is an American ex-pat who is a Latvian citizen. Manufacturing happens mostly in the northeastern EU, and the southeast asian manufacturing has almost all moved out of China at this point. It is strange, but despite the comments we see MikroTik is not that small, and it is one of the least Chinese (and perhaps even American) networking vendors out there.

Final Words

I hope you all enjoyed this look at MikroTik. Over the past two months, I have been very excited to share this with our readers. It has given me a different appreciation of the company and its products. Also, while I was there, I got to see some really neat next-generation products. If you think MikroTik is stopping at 100GbE, or with the Annapurna Labs AWS Graviton 1-based RDS servers, you have something else coming.

I just wanted to say thank you to all of you, the STH YouTube members, and the team at MikroTik for making this possible.