[143264] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: FTTH CPE landscape
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Nathan Eisenberg)
Thu Aug 4 16:55:54 2011
From: Nathan Eisenberg <nathan@atlasnetworks.us>
To: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2011 20:54:23 +0000
In-Reply-To: <E01EC15F-A7B7-4D54-ADF7-D73C07D56282@delong.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
> Why? As long as it can be a transparent router, why would it need to be
> a bridge?
Layer 2 CPE capability is a big deal, especially if you're doing unrouted m=
ulticast (see many TV/VoD over ethernet platforms for details). But it's a=
lso nice for handing the customer a layer-2 service port like they're used =
to getting, if they want it that way. The routing engine in CPE's is often=
simply not as capable as the bridging mechanism, so there's an end-user ex=
perience to consider.
It's also worth noting that this feature will probably become less importan=
t as IPv6 and DHCP6-PD becomes more widely deployed. Until then, the extra=
routing in IPv4 starts to chew up some serious address space if you're rol=
ling out thousands or more of the CPEs. See most national ISP's CPE config=
uration if you think it's unusual to want to hand off services on a bridged=
interface- it's not, at all.
Nathan Eisenberg
