[c-nsp] Best practice in configuring internet access services.

[Alex A. Pavlenko]

Colleagues!

Is there a common approach or best practice in providing internet access services on Cisco router?
This question is quite general so let me to concrete it with my current network as an example.
So there are few thousands of home customers(max 8000) connected to
Ethernet rings on the access layer. On the distribution layer those rings are 
aggregated on 3560G switch at layer 2.
Router is connected to aggregation switch and performs layer 3 operations 
such as intervlan routing access control, NAT, traffic-shaping or rate-limiting, netflow export,
may be DHCP. All customers are devided to groups of 256 or less, each group is one VLAN
trminated on a router Ethernet subinterface. This scheme has a lot of issues. For example 
there are IOS configuration lmitations. I mean if I'm going  to limit bandwidth in per
customer basis i have to specify an ACL with customers IP address to put it in a traffic-shape
or rate-limit statement, however only 700 numbered access-lists can be configured on a router :(
May be there are common approaches to configure routers and switches for similar network layout
and services? I know about PPPoE but i think it is more aplicable in DSL access networks,
not in Ethernet.
Thanks for any ideas.

--
Alex Pavlenko
System Administrator
Sandy Info