How are you aggregating WAN customers these days?

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1

Hello,

I'm looking to put some feelers out there and see what people are
doing to aggregate WAN customers (T1,T3, etc...) these days. What
platforms/devices are you using? What seems to be working/not working?
Any insights would be great!

Thanks,
Chris

2

Cisco ASR 1000. For T3 you can get a 4 port card. Seems to perform
well.

    Also have a 6500 deployed with some flexwan interfaces. Believe this
will also work in the 7000 something chassis.

    Justin

3

The ASRs seem to be the consensus in a lot of places. Wondering if
anyone has tried anything like aggregating T1 customers onto a mux
box, then connecting that back to a 6500.

What are the general impressions of the ASR series?

4

I need to get one to play with. I see them better for handling end-node terminations, and according to the cisco guys I've talked to, the ASR has and will continue to have more subscriber management functionality than traditional IOS.

For t1, I either run a mux(telco side) into a CT3(ISP side) on a 7200 (there's equiv SPAs), or if it hits one of my larger pops, I drop it into a mux(telco side) which terminates with all of my OC3 and smaller circuits into a CHOC48(telco/ISP crossconnect link).

Given that most of these circuits are being long hauled anyways, this just made the best sense to us. It also (even though telco/ISP are related in this case) assisted in management domains.

Jack

5

Still plenty of sites using Juniper E-series for circuit aggregation. Many deployments have been active for about 10 years.

Cheers,
Truman

6

Cheap and reliable. Cisco 7507, RSP4 or RSP8 or whatever, with ChanDS3 cards, running 12.0S.

7

I would concur that the ASR1000 works well for channelized T3
aggregation. We are currently phasing our 7600 series with SIP-200
cards and channelized T3 SPAs in favor of the ASR1000, using the same
SPAs, and have found them to perform well. We found that the SIP-200
on the 7600 was incapable of handling PPP flapping as may occur when a
T1 is having facility trouble or looped back on itself. In the 7600,
the SIP processes the PPP messaging, whereas the ASR SIP is a
passthrough to the RP for processing of PPP. When the 7600 SIP starts
having trouble, it can cause the SIP to crash or even have the overall
PPP process on the whole box stop responding, needing to reload the
whole router. It is possible that the beefier SIP modules on the 7600
would handle this better, but I have no experience with such.

Andrew Koch
andrew.koch@gawul.net

8

Juniper M20.

9

If you have a large amount of ppp/mlppp channelized T3's as most people then I would recommend dumping these into an Adtran TA5000 chassis with multiservice ct3 cards and dumping them to ethernet. Then to an ASR or whatever your vlan agg box is. The cost per t3 port should be significantly cheaper than comparable cisco/juniper router ct3 ports. Last I checked the TA5K doesn't have double tag stacking or HDLC support, but that may or may not be an issue for some.

~jerry

10

The ASRs seem to be the consensus in a lot of places. Wondering if
anyone has tried anything like aggregating T1 customers onto a mux
box, then connecting that back to a 6500.

I work in that kind of topology all day long/ both in 6500 & ASR's.
All is well/