Huawei and ZTE Routers

Thu May 7 19:17:04 UTC 2015

On 5/7/2015 2:25 PM, Daniel Corbe wrote:
> 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.
>

2nd hand information:

Apparently the NMS for ZTE's GPON gear is an ugly contraption.
When upgrades are needed:
"we have to deploy a series of convuluted batch files"
"and it has to be installed in the directory that whatever they 
installed it to in China"
"paths are hardcoded in the app"

Hopefully there is no crossover into ZTE's other products.