The other thread about the Alcatel-Lucent routers has been pleasantly
delightful. Our organization used to believe that Juniper, Cisco, and
Brocade were the only true vendors for carrier grade routing, but now we
are going to throw Alcatel-Lucent into the mix.
ZTE and Huawei, the big chinese vendors, have also been mentioned to us. I
know there are large national security issues with using these vendors in
the US, but I know Level3 and other large American vendors use Huawei and
ZTE in their networks.
How do their products perform? How are they compared to Cisco and Juniper
on the performance side of the house? Is their pricing really half or less
of that of Cisco and Juniper? Is it worth using these vendors or not worth
the hassle?
The other thread about the Alcatel-Lucent routers has been pleasantly
delightful. Our organization used to believe that Juniper, Cisco, and
Brocade were the only true vendors for carrier grade routing, but now we
are going to throw Alcatel-Lucent into the mix.
ZTE and Huawei, the big chinese vendors, have also been mentioned to us. I
know there are large national security issues with using these vendors in
the US, but I know Level3 and other large American vendors use Huawei and
ZTE in their networks.
How do their products perform? How are they compared to Cisco and Juniper
on the performance side of the house? Is their pricing really half or less
of that of Cisco and Juniper? Is it worth using these vendors or not worth
the hassle?
I don't know much about Huawei but be wary of ZTE's claims. They love
their vendor lock-in. They have a bad habit of giving away hardware for
next to nothing and then ratcheting up support costs.
Opex needs to be a consideration when selecting an equipment vendor as
well as capex.
Apparently the NMS for ZTE's GPON gear is an ugly contraption.
When upgrades are needed:
"we have to deploy a series of convuluted batch files"
"and it has to be installed in the directory that whatever they installed it to in China"
"paths are hardcoded in the app"
Hopefully there is no crossover into ZTE's other products.
ZTE and Huawei, the big chinese vendors, have also been mentioned to
us. I know there are large national security issues with using these
vendors in the US
uh, you have not seen the lovely picture of the nsa implanting a cisco?