[c-nsp] Cisco working as PPPoE Server

[James Bensley]

On 15 August 2016 at 20:26, Sam Silvester <sam.silvester at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi James,
>
> What makes you say that? I've had good success over the years with the
> ASR1k series for PPP (L2TP and PPPoE) termination so interested in any
> perceived advantages for the ASR9k in this role.


>From my personal perspective we had a lot of issues when testing
ASR1002-X's as our new LNS/BNG platform. This gripe is kind of a
personal one but I'm having trouble letting it go :) Whilst the config
is similar to a traditional 7200 many features don't work or have been
changed. See some notes I made here:
https://null.53bits.co.uk/index.php?page=asr-ios-xr-lns-config

We also had quite a few issues getting QoS to work as we would have
like it, again some notes here:
https://null.53bits.co.uk/index.php?page=adsl-and-lns-shaping-llq

I think for either the ASR1K or ASR9K series you need to be using
RADIUS with CoA, which is fine, that is common today, but we were a
bit behind the times probably so that is/was another hurdle that has
made the transition longer/harder than I would have liked.

IOS-XE has been buggy for us specifically with the BNG/LNS feature set
on ASR1Ks (I know we have had bugs on ASR920s for example, but we use
them for a different purpose). We've had plenty of bugs on the ASR9K's
too, but for the 1Ks pretty much all the bugs I have encountered
were/are related to us using them as an LNS. I don't think (off the
top of my head) I have hit any bugs on the ASR1K's for any of our
"normal" feature set (MPLS L2 and L3 VPNs).

I recommended the ASR9001 because it has 10G ports built in. We chose
ASR1002-X's but if you want to go over 1Gbps of LNS traffic you need
to either bundle some 1Gbps ports and the QoS on port-channels for
PPPoL2TPoIPoMPLS is not good (nor for PPPoE), or use multiple layer 3
individual 1Gbps interfaces (the design I am settling on) or buy some
10G ports. If you can get away with an ASR9001-S then I think you
might get more mileage (depending on your personal pricing lists etc).

Many people are happily using the ASR1000s as BNGs, I would just
recommend you heavy test all your different deployment scenarios. Also
check out the cisco-bba list for subscriber/broadband specific topics.

Cheers,
James.