Hello NANOG,
Due to unforeseen circumstances we need to consider alternative vendors for our GPON system, moving away from Motorola. We wanted to throw out a line and find out what other networks have deployed and what experiences they have had positive or negative with them. Thanks in advance for any replies.
Josh Hoppes
Network Engineer
Cedar Falls Utilities
Here at Blue Ridge InternetWorks we evaluated a few vendors (a couple of years ago) and are extremely happy with our choice of Calix E7. The engineering is top-notch, optical components are good quality, boot time is very fast, decent GUI (not perfect, but improves with each software release), software upgrades have been (knock wood) seamless every time, etc. And the E7 line is easy to use -- I hear tell that the C7 line had a horrible CLI and cryptic GUI and was powerful-but-demanding, but the E7 just acts like a big Ethernet switch with VLANs, customer-side rate-limiting, and a little bit of DHCP snooping, security, and multicast processing. And their tech support, both pre-sales and on-demand, have been responsive and very helpful every time I've called on them. I don't think they are cheap, and we wish they made an ONT model with many Ethernet ports but no POTS and RF video, but that's just a product mix suggestion. Overall we are really happy, and it's easy to deploy and making us actual money.
We have a rather small network, with a 2-slot (thin) E7 chassis. They also have a 20-slot large chassis. Only reservations I would have about it:
- Currently runs only RSTP, but not MST. So difficult to load-balance redundant links into our switching core. I don't remember if MST is on the planned feature list.
- Currently no true IPv6 support. You can hand off IPv6 over a "straight transparent LAN" connection, but you can't use the DHCP snooping / IP source verify features, which they have in v4, to ensure that a customer must use DHCPv6 to get their address and then cannot impersonate another customer with a manual IPv6 address. Calix says full IPv6 support is planned.
- We had a few 711GX ONTs that developed optical transceiver failures in the field. It could be something that we did, but it seemed to me that it was just a bad batch of components in that specific product, since the 710GX and 711GE and 716GE's were all fine. All were replaced under warranty just fine, so no complaints other than customer downtime and our time to repair.
Feel free to ping me off-list for any other questions.
Jeff Saxe
blue ridge internetworks
321 east main st • suite 200
charlottesville va 22902
434.817.0707 x 2024
www.briworks.com
Central Virginia’s technology authority since 2000.
We have a Calix C7 as well as some E7-2's in a few markets for a little
over a year. We only deal with GPON/AE deployments and the C7 worked to
get us started but the E7 is definitely more purpose built for ethernet &
fiber services. Just started several major build-outs which pushed us to
re-evaluate vendors and after looking at a few other vendors we ended up
going back to the Calix E7 platform. Due to price and features vs other
vendors. We have three E7-20's that we're turning up. I would agree with
Jeff's positives. They are starting to roll out indoor ONT's which will
shave some cost off of the ONT & Battery for the CPE.
- They do only support RSTP now, not MST but in our deployment we have 2 x
10 GE LAG ports on two separate line switching cards. MST will be coming
in a future release.
- True IPv6 support is coming next year
- Quite a few other new features coming in the next year that we're excited
to see.
Feel free to ping me off-list if you have any other questions.
Nick Colton
Director of Network Operations
ALLO Communications
Another vote for Calix here, but we started with Occam B-series gear (DSL+POTS) and
kept buying their gear into the GPON times. Calix bought them.. so the vote is for
Calix, even though I haven't used their C or E series gear.
I do a fair amount of scripting for various tasks and have been fairly happy with
their EPS ring protection.. not exactly like running [M|R]STP, but really quite
resilient, at any rate.
Their software is all running on a Linux core, has a decent (but not great)
Cisco-ish CLI, and a very good web-UI. It seems like they're focusing more on the
web-UI than the CLI, these days, but both are built on the same internals.
We use B-6322 GPON blades (and quite a few of them, adding more on a daily basis..)
and mainly their 12 blade chassis'. These chassis only have an option for -48VDC
power, but are very well built overall, and the software is getting better on every
new release. I expect we're nearing a sort of magic period of time when the Calix
engineers and the Occam engineers are on the same page and really making progress,
copying the best features from each platform onto the other. It seems to be showing
in the early OccamOS 7.x releases, I can't speak for the C/E OS', I've never used
them.
-- Jonathan Towne
On Tue, Dec 06, 2011 at 07:52:20PM +0000, Josh V. Hoppes scribbled:
# Hello NANOG,
We're using Huawei for this.
It's a stable system, and they do this quite well. Watch out
for the EMS though; it's great for management and
provisioning, but customer migration is not supported (yet).
The ONU that ships from Huawei is also not terribly good as
a clever CPE. So if you're thinking of doing interesting
things, suggest you use their ONU as a bridge and have
something else terminating the PPPoE/DHCP sessions.
Otherwise, I'd certainly recommend looking at Huawei for
this. We've been reasonably happy using them for our FTTH
and IPTv deployment.
Cheers,
Mark.
- Currently runs only RSTP, but not MST. So difficult to
load-balance redundant links into our switching core. I
don't remember if MST is on the planned feature list.
We run LACP either to the same or different routers
depending on a few internal factors.
For LACP to different routers, we use MC-LAG.
Don't want to have to deal with "Spamming" Tree :-).
- Currently no true IPv6 support. You can hand off IPv6
over a "straight transparent LAN" connection, but you
can't use the DHCP snooping / IP source verify features,
which they have in v4, to ensure that a customer must
use DHCPv6 to get their address and then cannot
impersonate another customer with a manual IPv6 address.
Calix says full IPv6 support is planned.
Same problem on the Huawei, too.
Full support is planned for mid-to-late 2013. Of course,
that puts a dent in our plans.
- We had a few 711GX ONTs that developed optical
transceiver failures in the field. It could be something
that we did, but it seemed to me that it was just a bad
batch of components in that specific product, since the
710GX and 711GE and 716GE's were all fine. All were
replaced under warranty just fine, so no complaints
other than customer downtime and our time to repair.
We've found that the Huawei works well with other vendor
optics too. Cisco, Juniper, OEM's. All good.
Of course, for 10Gbps uplinks, the SFP+ units are bought
from Huawei. We have some SPF+ modules from Cisco and their
OEM's, but haven't tried them on the Huawei. Experience
suggests it would work, but they're quite premium that we
always need them for the Cisco's anyway :-).
Mark.
In any such vendor choice, I'd say make sure that they have workable
IPv6 before making any major investments. Otherwise, you've got a
dead-end platform that won't serve you very well for very many years.
Owen
GPON deployment for FTTH tends to be, really, an Ethernet
switch. There is just additional intelligence thrown in to
keep the thing from being suicidal at Layer 2 for that many
customers when doing typical consumer broadband.
If you're using the GPON AN as as a regular switch, i.e.,
one VLAN per customer, then you can roll IPv6 to your FTTH
customers just as you would on a Cisco Catalyst switch, for
example.
But most operators are using them for broadband deployments,
and the split horizon mechanisms implemented as part of the
Broadband Forum spec. for GPON make it unintuitive that v6
be supported off the bat for DHCP and PPPoE. Of course, this
isn't rocket science, and just needs to be added in software
- a problem many vendors are suffering from. As we do with
all of them, keep pushing for support for the features you
need in v6. Just make sure you don't buy a dud.
Mark.
In late August Calix came to our site and tested their IPv6 support on the
C7 platform for their upcoming 8.0 release. They tested both on GPON and
VDSL2 using the N:1 (VLAN per service) approach. There were some issues
that prevented all the CPE I had from working, but since then they've taken
it back and completed that work. I've invited them back onsite to re-test
so we can validate before they begin their controlled release.
Frank
Sounds great.
Keep us posted as they develop the software. It would be
interesting to see what issues arise in this area.
Mark.
Indeed, I'm very interested in the outcome of this, as well.
I've been pestering my Calix SE for a long while about proper
IPv6 support.
-- Jonathan Towne
On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 12:55:52PM +0800, Mark Tinka scribbled:
# On Thursday, December 08, 2011 03:10:31 AM Frank Bulk wrote: