Linux BNG

Sat Jul 14 18:29:08 UTC 2018

>The setup is one VLAN per customer. Because 4095 VLANs is not enough, we have QinQ with double VLAN tagging on the customers. The customers can use DHCP or static configuration. DHCP packets need to be option82 tagged and forwarded to a DHCP server. Every >customer has one or more static IP addresses.

What you are describing is how the national fibre network delivers customers to the ISP's in New Zealand (with DHCP and PPP being at the ISP's choice). Generally in New Zealand we have a very active Linux community but I have to say I have not seen any of the service providers attempt to use Linux as a BNG in this way for production customers. Commonly an MPLS network is used to transport these QinQ layer2 "handovers" to centralised BNG's. These BNG's in my experience are normally Cisco (asr1k,asr9k), Juniper (MX, hardware of virtual), Nokia (7750 hardware or virtual) and a small amount of Mikrotik (tends to get swapped out with the previous vendor solutions when scale (2000+) rises).  As much as I appreciate Linux, I personally still also see the value of the vendor offerings in this case (think stability and guaranteed performance). My biggest issue with the vendor offerings is that they are not making their virtual offerings (VMX, VSR) attractive enough pricing wise at the small scale, we have successful virtual Juniper and Nokia BNG's in production but pricing wise it generally ends up with the service provider thinking that hardware was probably a better choice in the long run.