Dial Up Solutions

Sat Oct 17 13:01:28 UTC 2015

On Fri, 16 Oct 2015, Will Duquette wrote:

> Does anyone have any suggestions on equipment for our ISP that is still
> supporting dial up customers?
>
> At the moment we are running 3Com Total Control 1000's but are running out
> of spare parts as we have failures.  Given that this gear is so old trying
> to source spare parts is proving to be difficult.
>
> We do have access to an Cisco AS5200 but are looking for maybe a SIP based
> solution that could possibly run on our VM farm?  Has anyone heard of
> anything like that or does it even exist?

The AS5200 is so old, their 10mb ethernet ports are AUI, so you need 
transcievers hanging off the back of them, and though I bet you can get 
them for free or the cost of shipping, I wouldn't recommend them.

AFAIK, cisco stopped making dedicated dialup service gear some years ago, 
but you can still find AS5300 and AS5400 gear used for pennies on the 
dollar.  I'd avoid the older 2U AS5300 96 and 192 port units.  We had a 
bunch of those 2 jobs ago, and as we started pulling them from service 
(shutting down the dialup POPs), we found that many of them would not boot 
up again when tested back at the office.  I kind of wonder now if they 
were affected by cisco's "defective RAM issue".

Depending on the density you need, an AS5400HPX (and an M13 mux if needed) 
might be a reasonable way to go.

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  Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
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