On 6/15/23 09:21, Ryan Hamel wrote:

I would never let the customer manage the CPE device, unless it was through some customer portal where automation can do checks and balances, nor have the device participate in a ring topology -- home runs or bust. If the device fails or has an issue requiring a field dispatch, that is on the customer to help arrange that time and provide on-site contact info, otherwise the SLA clock stops ticking.

Now if the customer refuses to allow the vendor to pickup the CPE (regardless of make/model) and/or building aggregation/demarc + UPS hardware, the police can get called for theft of equipment depending on its value, or customer/landlord is sued depending on what the contract states.

Your network, your rules.

As for Ciena's SAOS feature set, I was only going by the RFC's and protocols listed on some of the higher end CPE equipment. I do not have first hand experience with them.

They are hoping most customers buy based on what is listed, and not what is actually tested. Sadly, enough customers do that that it still makes sense for them to market that way.

From operators in my circles that have deployed optical OEM gear for MPLS, those are rapidly being swapped out for more conventional OEM's.

Tier 1's as in Cogent, Level3/Lumen, Zayo, etc.

Hehe... okay.

Doesn't matter the size of the operation, the options for boxes is still the same.

Juniper's ACX7024 does look interesting as a building demarc/agg device, but overkill for a single client CPE. It can't hold full tables for transit handoffs, but the customer can establish multi-hop BGP sessions upstream for that.

Like I said, if you are looking for a CPE to participate in your Metro-E backbone, and have all the features of a PE router, that is going to be a pretty hard combination to solve.

Mark.