Huawei and ZTE Routers

Thu May 7 18:25:26 UTC 2015

Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com> writes:

> 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.