[c-nsp] Licensing question for ASR9000

[Nick Hilliard]

Mattias Gyllenvarg via cisco-nsp wrote on 29/10/2025 13:42:
> In my experience, the guiding principle for what is included in each tier
> is designed to force you to select the most advanced tier or at least one
> tier higher then you want too by feature gerrymandering.

I have no major issue with reasonable RTU licensing, but that's 
"reasonable" as defined by the customer rather than by the vendor. In a 
couple of weeks time, I'll be putting in an order with one of my 
networking suppliers for additional RTU licensing for some kit, and will 
be quite happy to do so. The costs don't sting, the feature set doesn't 
sting, it's RTU, and there are no practical sting-in-the-tail issues.

I.e. the vendor realised that setting out to hurt the customer was a bad 
approach when they were creating their licensing model. The outcome is 
that there's a good long-term working relationship between the customer 
and the vendor and this is a good place for starting conversations about 
new sales, including licensing.

License-related upgrade restrictions were mentioned. As it happens, when 
we were evaluating alternative equipment to the RTU vendor above, we 
ended up hard-bricking an alternative vendor's kit after an upgrade 
failed due to ... licensing. The device in question - which was a 
door-stop at that point - was shipped back to the vendor and they lost 
out on 7-8 years of hardware and licensing sales over the lifetime of 
that particular network architecture.

I sure hope Cisco don't think that upgrade restrictions due to licensing 
are a good idea. Not least because there's nothing like finding this 
sort of thing out at 02:00 in the middle of a maintenance window when 
you're under time pressure to get a job completed, with operational 
consequences if the upgrade isn't done (see my previous rants on 
cisco-nsp many years ago about transceiver locking for exactly the same 
reason).

Nick