Alcatel as Peering and MSE(PE)

Tue May 5 17:32:55 UTC 2009

They work quite well, specially in combination with Alcatel 5620SAM 
management software... we use it for managing most of the "aggregation" 
backbone (MPLS, VPLS, VPRN, etc...).
Also use some of them as "border" routers to hold some STM-4 and STM-1 
links.
I recomend OS version 7. Mostly because of some bugs with version 4+. 
And specially because (If I'm not wrong), you need version 7+ to have 32 
bit ASN support.

Regards,
N.

Dan Snyder wrote:
> We have 42 Alcatel 7x50's deployed currently that are being used as P and PE
> devices on our network.  We have been very happy with them.  We are using
> them to offer both VPLS and VPRN service.  If you have any specific
> questions about what we have seen let me know.
> 
> Thanks,
> Dan
> 
> On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 10:29 AM, Mauritz Lewies <mauritz at lho.co.za> wrote:
> 
>> 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
>>