Alcatel as Peering and MSE(PE)

Tue May 5 14:29:43 UTC 2009

Hi

I'm based in Africa and involved in SP/Telco consulting and deployments.

We have a customer that has chosen Alcatel (political choice) as their
Layer-3 core devices for P, MSE, BGP Route Servers and Peering/Transit
devices.
All based on the Alcatel 7750 chassis.

Unfortunately Alcatel is not very widely used in Africa on layer-3 (But
as transmission and Layer-2 kit they are widely deployed) and so we have
very little experience with them at this layer.

What is the general consensus of them in these layers of the network and
can anyone point out some strong points/short falls?

We've mostly worked on Juniper/Cisco and a little experience on Redback
so I can not comment much on the Alcatel layer-3 kit and need some
advise on the true technical abilities of the kit. (ie non vendor
marketing or competitor shoot down information)

Thanks,

Mauritz Lewies