Hi I'm based in Africa and involved in SP/Telco consulting and deployments. We have a customer that has chosen Alcatel (political choice) as their Layer-3 core devices for P, MSE, BGP Route Servers and Peering/Transit devices. All based on the Alcatel 7750 chassis. Unfortunately Alcatel is not very widely used in Africa on layer-3 (But as transmission and Layer-2 kit they are widely deployed) and so we have very little experience with them at this layer. What is the general consensus of them in these layers of the network and can anyone point out some strong points/short falls? We've mostly worked on Juniper/Cisco and a little experience on Redback so I can not comment much on the Alcatel layer-3 kit and need some advise on the true technical abilities of the kit. (ie non vendor marketing or competitor shoot down information) Thanks, Mauritz Lewies