FRESH
Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsBroadband Network Gateway (BNG)[1]
[1]: https://github.com/codelaboratoryltd/bng#bng-broadband-netwo...
I also don’t get the focus on handling DHCP renewals in the kernel fast path. With 2000 subscribers per OLT and say a 5 minute lease time that’s only a few renewals a second.
We ended using a couple of cheap Mikrotik as PPPoE concentrators for every access room, in a similar way as you did. But the reliability of Mikrotik routers was not the best
https://www.6wind.com/vrouter-vsr-solutions/virtual-broadban...
- Cisco tried distributed BNG about ten years ago, their "cnBNG" running on their x86 UCS server line. See [0]
- A UK company called Metaswitch tried doing this with eBPF and some home-grown tech (VPP meets fd.io and special sauce) in about 2018. Interestingly they pivoted the tech to work on 5G where blazing fast user plane is essential [1]. They got bought by Microsoft, ground into glass, and wiped out five years later.
- There was a lot of talk in ~2020 about whether wireline (fiber) and wireless (5G cellular) infrastructures could converge, with the BNG becoming another node in the system, like an AGF, and authenticating users against a UDR. 5G was already very distributed and it made a lot of sense at least on market-techture slide decks.[2]
Looking back, the difficulty making this commercial was not splitting up the function, making it performant, or running it disagg on commodity hardware. The difficulty was finding a set of anchor customers who were experiencing such pain on their existing BNG that they would be prepared to jump ship from their big iron to something new knowing full well that the new system would only support 10% of what their old Lucent 7750s or Ericsson boxes could do.
Taking disagg as an example, it makes little sense unless your network is above a certain size. But if you run a big network, like DT or AT&T, say, then you will demand hundreds of features be present before you will look at an alternative. Does it work with my OSS. Does it support all the features of RFC XYZ and the special tweaks that only we have. Will it keep the three-letter agencies happy when they serve a warrant. Can it pass muster with my security people. Can the developer survive working with my procurement people long enough to make enough money to fund development.
No disruptive vendor --none-- has ever made it past this barrier into the network core, despite operators saying for years that they want to work with disruptors. That's why Nokia, Ericsson, and Huawei reign supreme and telcos haven't innovated in decades.
[0] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/routers/cnBNG/cnBNG-CP...
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-new-approach-pure-softwar...