Hello,
We’re looking for a good replacement for fractional T1 customers with Cisco 1600- & 1700-series routers as their CPE. They are good routers, but the ongoing support costs are an issue, and we need to replace them ASAP.
Someone had mentioned several CPE vendors, such as Adtran and Netopia. Are there any others, and does anyone have any pros/cons of what they’re familiar with?
Thanks,
= TC
Have you tried a softnet depot maintenance agreement. This entitles you
to IOS upgrades but H/W replacement is some negotiated percentage of list
price.
The other guys _may_ be cheaper in the short run but hardware replacement
is always like having a root canal cant speak for Netopia but I have
dealt with Adtran ended up buying a spare DS3 CSU/DSU because of the
experience.
Cisco has many warts but they do honor their maintenance contracts unlike
some other vendors who I have had the misfortune of dealing with.
Scott C. McGrath
Once upon a time, Scott McGrath <mcgrath@fas.harvard.edu> said:
The other guys _may_ be cheaper in the short run but hardware replacement
is always like having a root canal cant speak for Netopia but I have
dealt with Adtran ended up buying a spare DS3 CSU/DSU because of the
experience.
Hmm, we've had hardware replaced by Adtran lots of times; the only
problem we experienced was they didn't know how to handle one of our
guys driving up to receiving (I guess if we had a big brown truck they'd
have been okay). We ended up having to ship something across town; I
think UPS thought we were crazy.
I'm quite familiar with the Netopia R53xx series T1 routers. Excellent little
routers for deplyoing to customers. Very reliable, and if you are familiar
with the DSL routers, you'll be right at home. They have built in
PPTP/ATMP/IPSec VPN support (both client and server), basic routing features,
filtering, NAT, one-to-one IP mapping, remote syslog logging, as well as
everything you'd expect in a T1 router (fractional T1 support, HDLC, PPP,
FrameRelay, etc). Theres also a 56k dialup backup module which is handy.
I had excellent luck with OpenRoute (formerly Proteon) GT90's. They
handle dual ethernet or T1/E1. They need an external CSU/DSU, but they
get the job done and they're very stable. They will do NAT and most of
the other goodies that you can think about. They also have gt900 firewall
and they have a model with a hardware accelerator to handle cryptographic
calculations. I installed one of the latter into a customer about 4 years
ago and I've not had any trouble with it, except to upgrade the OS once to
fix some wierd packet length issues surrounding IPSEC tunnels.
Curtis