[c-nsp] PPPoe Access Concetrators

[Kristofer Sigurdsson]

Hi,

On Thu, 2005-08-11 at 14:52 -0400, Robert E.Seastrom wrote:
> Alexandre Snarskii <snar at paranoia.ru> writes:
> 
> > Does anybody has real-life experience with 2800 in this role ? 
> > I'm planning to test 2800 as an pppoe concentrator and wish to 
> > know how much traffic/sessions it will be able to handle.. 
> 
> I've been thinking the same thing, but the 2811 only has 1400 software
> IDBs.  Could get a little tight for us, I think.  Still, the price is
> right...  would be nice as a bootstrapping platform until there's

You can probably do more with a 2821 or 2851.  They're also reasonably
priced.  Also, you could check out the 3800 series, but I believe that's
less bang for the buck (they're more expensive).  Check'em out, though,
if you're interested.

> enough money to support getting a few 7301s.  Do available feature
> sets for the 2800 actually support acting as a PPPoE/L2TP server (LNS)?

Yes, at least in the Advanced IP Services feature set.

> 
> I've used both 7206VXR/NPE300 and 7301s for this application, btw.
> *with our customer traffic loads* (some of our customers are
> filesharin-fools, but I hear that's a lot more common these days),

Agreed.  Our routers are not scaling to the number of users they should
be for this exact reason - they have to route the customer's traffic, 
and given that the smallest connections we aggregate are 8 Mbit/s ADSL,
this creates a noticeable load.  Then again, I believe p2p is probably
the reason for people to buy those connections and hence, paying our
salary...:-)


> The world could certainly do with an LNS/LAC/tunnelswitch platform
> that ran on commodity PC hardware.  Plenty of CPU and RAM bandwidth to
> do a few hundred megs of bit-banging, stripping headers off and
> putting them back on again.

I'd like to see a reliable PC box (quality hardware) throughput ~ 500 
Mbit/s or more...I've seen largeish PC firewalls, but in most cases
their price is similar to a similar working Cisco router.  They do
scale further down than most routers, though, so they might be an option
for very small networks.
Another choice is to go to your local Radioshack, buy cheap hardware and
make yourself a box, but I wouldn't trust something like that as an 
important router.

-- 
Kristófer Sigurðsson           Tel: +354 414 1600
Netrekstur/Network Operations  IP Fjarskipti ehf.