WISPs discuss the routers they use, focusing on price and support.

[January 3, 2007]

In a discussion thread on the ISP-Wireless list concerning high end routers for WISPs, DF posted his opinions on the major players:

These are my personal takes on the major players in BGP:

Foundry: Cisco-like syntax. BGP operations seem stable. Good if you need to combine routing and switching (i.e., you are on a budget and need to condense gear). Provides decent product support, slightly less on firmware support (but not bad).

Alcatel: GateD base but limited development. Better as multi-function switches (ATM/Ethernet), not so much as routers.

Marconi: same as Alcatel. Are these guys even in business anymore?

Nortel: no personal interaction with them, but from what I hear, when you buy Nortel you tether yourself to them. They aren't known for super BGP routers.

Imagestream: GateD base over Linux for EGP/IGP operations. A decent mix of Open Source and Commercial product. They obviously are on this list and others (good job!). Probably recommended that you understand BGP very well before using them, as they don't have hoards of support staff 24/7 available to troubleshoot your particular BGP minutiae over and over (but for real problems specifically related to their products they are good.) No MPLS capabilities, but most everything else. While they are Linux-based they are not Zebra/Quagga-based (GateD), which is a good thing.

Juniper: For huge (and expensive) networks that employ Juniper-capable admins. If you have both they rock. Support is good...but $$$$.

Lucent: Took over Riverstone instead of using Juniper's (their 'partner') gear for routing. Their own older routers (Access line) are just that—older.

Riverstone: Higher end routers good for medium to large BGP operations (4 to 20 peers, full tables), lower end routers good for small BGP operations. Like Foundry, the lower-end are good if you need to condense functionality (32 ports of switching with expansion, can take two full peers). Support has lagged in the past (regrettably) but the products are awesome (I'm biased toward them with 14 of them in my current network and more planned). Originally GateD-based, pushed a lot of their own development. Now owned by Lucent, and known as the Lucent Ethernet Router series.

Quagga/Linux: Free Linux-based EGP/IGP routing platform. Similar to taking an Imagestream path, except you are on your own. Also, bugs in the code won't get fixed quickly, and tend to appear more than infrequently (but it is pretty stable.) Documentation stinks, login via telnet not ssh. It's a fork of the Zebra routing platform, which is also still free, but buggy.

OpenBGPD/OpenBSD: Free OpenBSD-based EGP/IGP routing platform. Solid, secure, free, and very scalable. Again, you're operating without vendor support. Non-standard of BGP functionality (modeled after PF). Awesome integration with CARP and PF, makes for great firewalls, routers and route servers. If you are system administrator and appreciate Unix, you will fall in love with OpenBGPD. If you are a Linux admin, you will be surprised at the lack of learning curve involved. Community support is actually pretty good.

The 'traditional' vendors sell the fact that you are wrapped in the warmth of their support, but remember how difficult it can be to have a TAC department support a BGP implementation that is complex (and one it doesn't see every day).

My point is that the reality of support should be based on their ability to deal with product/firmware-specific issues (which hopefully can be dealt with off-crisis by the existence of redundancy), and the client should rely on other sources for configuration/implementation support. So if you don't want to pay for product/firmware support, and you can handle your own configuration/implementation support (meaning you are good at both system administration and BGP operations), the free and semi-free (read Imagestream and OpenBGPD) options are great choices, and have made many organizations happy, despite the scare tactics of the larger vendors.

MB replied:

Here is my experience:

Juniper: Great gear, expensive, very high performance. An M7i with next day 24/7 support, 2 port DS-3, redundant DC power, 850 Mhz route engine, 1.5 GB RAM, 256M B Flash, and 20 GB HDD is about $25,000. I believe the J-series runs Linux.

Foundry: The NetIRON MLX rocks, I wish I had one. We use all Foundry L3 switches on our network. Support is great. If you have a problem (we had one and it was a software bug) they dedicate personnel to your issue, local corporate techies that come to you to help if you need it. I just can't say how much I like Foundry. The big drawback is ATM support, it is basically non existent, But if you can get Ethernet feeds, you wont be disappointed.

Imagestream: I know a few ISPs that run them and swear by them. I personally will look at them for our next ATM router.

Jeff Broadwick, CEO of ImageStream replied:

Actually, we do support Quagga, and are moving customers to that more and more. It is now a very stable, reliable, full featured program and we are very happy with it.

As to the support, we have the number of folks necessary to support our customer base. When things are busy, it might take a bit longer to get to you, but we will do it in the time frame we promise. Also, when you get an ImageStream support person, they are an engineer, not someone working off of screen prompts.

Many of our customers know absolutely nothing about BGP. We have a program where we will do all the upfront configuration for a low fee.

MPLS is on the way, hopefully early next year.

—End