I shall shortly be setting up a small ISP to cover some rural internet connections in the UK. The service shall be delivered over fibre optics to a potential customer base of 1,600 initially, and then expanding out from there into near by villages bringing the potential customer base to about 4,000 connections.
The penetration ratio remains to be seen, but we’ve based financial calculations on 25%, so many hundreds of customers. (alternatives provide sub 2Mb/s connections to 6Mb/s, so we’re the only game in town that can provide anything faster for the next couple of years, so it could well be higher…)
The services shall be various speed grades up to 50Mb/s initially, but I would like to be able to support 100Mb/s. (both with upload limited to 10Mb/s unless they purchase business products). The backhaul shall be 1Gb/s uncontended Ethernet leased line.
Customers shall be aggregated on a fibre chassis and presented to the Mikrotik on an Ethernet connection as PPPoE sessions. The router shall need to terminate the PPPoE sessions, perform some traffic shaping to prioritize VOIP, Web etc over P2P, and generally make for a good experience. Users shall be authenticated and accounted for using DMA’s Radius Manger running on a separate box.
I would like to ask your thoughts on hardware requirements for the core router. I don’t think that any current Mikrotik hardware can cut it, so x86 looks to be the way to go. I’m thinking of a single CPU quad core xeon with a small amount of memory. I was also thinking of using SSDs, though I’m not sure how much RouterOS accesses the disk (I was thinking they’d be more reliable than spindles). For the network cards I am thinking of one of the Intel quad port server adapters.
What would you specify if you were looking for something with a little room for expansion (greater penetration ratio or faster speeds)? Cost isn’t too much of an issue (digging fibre isn’t cheap), but let’s not go crazy.
PPPoE over FTTH definitely isn’t the norm. The prioritization of multiple PPPoE sessions does not typically tie into the queuing performed by Ethernet chips inside Active Ethernet switches. Personally, I would prefer doing DHCP Option 82.
Are you going to try to make use of RB2011s with SFP ports ?
If so, what switches are you considering on the other side of the RB2011s w/SFPs ?
Are you doing some form of multiplexing, or are you deploying as many strands as you have customers ?
The technology shall be GPON for residential customers and Active Ethernet for business customers. The aggregation hardware is still to be decided as I am about to start evaluating several solutions in the coming weeks. At this time I’m leaning towards the same kit that BT (UK’s incumbent telecoms operator) is using in their FTTC / FTTP solution.
The GPON splitters shall be housed at the central office and individual tails taken to each premise. This allows us the ultimate in flexibility, whilst reaping the cost benefits of GPON and the ability for RF Overlay, and doesn’t preclude swapping to Active Ethernet if we feel it is better suited in future.
I believe that PPPoE still reigns supreme in FTTx land too. Again, BT is using it for their deployment covering millions of houses. How would you authenticate users using username & passwords over DHCP?
I should point out that VoIP shall be delivered in a separate VLAN to the internet traffic and outside of the PPPoE session all together.
As mentioned in my OP I’m not sure that current MT hardware can handle the load so I am looking for recommendations on x86 hardware to use, and of course anything to avoid.
Unfortunately the dslreports.com website is well and truely broken, so I’m unable to read your reference at this time.
Mon Apr 16 13:52:50 EDT 2012
dslreports.com is offline
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Update Tue Apr 17 04:14:29 EDT 2012
Things have turned out to be more complicated. Although no hardware was fried, our large storage array has decided,
probably as a result of going dark in mid write, that our two sql servers can no longer have access to one of the small,
but important, partitions that makes up the larger SQL data area. All data is there, but it refuses to offer it.
At this point all courses of action involve delays. When I know more I'll post :( -Justin
Update 15:35 EDT
Our data center experienced a power outage which affected our entire system. We are in the process of recovering everything
and turning a few cranky servers into happy ones.
Apologies for the inconvenience, we expect to be up in a few hours
Update 16:18 EDT
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The power outage affected the entire data center and we are still awaiting our turn to power up some machines.
We will keep this page updated.
Update 19:20 EDT
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Unfortunately, a database server doesn't take kindly to being taken down without proper shutdown procedures and the
restoration efforts are still under way. No ETA at this time.
Ya somos unos cuantos como para hacer un asado. Si alguno tiene interes en intercambiar ideas, tengo un par de instalaciones con FTTH y FTTLa hechas y soportadas con Mikrotik.
Well! we’re so many! If anyone wants to share experiences and ideas I’ve got a few installations on FTTH and FTTLa supported on Mikrotik.
