[afnog] XLAT646 deployment

[Mark Tinka]

On 7/5/21 09:40, JORDI PALET MARTINEZ wrote:

> Agree, not every year ... you just need one replacement for moving to 464XLAT. And if you decide to go for your own OpenWRT version, you are paving the way for future updates that you may offer to the customers and not depend anymore on concrete CPE vendors ... in addition to have a much cheaper CPE, which can be even more powerful.
>
> Remember that CPEs are basically designed following a very simple approach. SoC vendor (basically one of Mediatek, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Realtek, and Marvell) makes a chip set and a reference design. CPE vendors use the reference design and select if they one to have "n" number of ports, USBs, other interfaces, and design a "case". Sometimes, even the same product is being sold with a different case or same case/different label. They use the SDK from the SoC vendor (most of them based in fact in OpenWRT), or use directly OpenWRT. Done.
>
> In fact, you can find in Alibaba *the same* CPEs as "well-known" vendors with an OEM label, even with "more" features ... You don't need to buy hundreds or thousands. You can make a pilot with 10 employees and buy just 10 units. Of course, if you start mass deployment, you want to save some dollars and price will go down a little bit if you buy 100 or 1000 units, but the major savings will be in the shipping and customs costs.
>
> I've used MT7621 (https://www.mediatek.com.es/products/homeNetworking/mt7621) in many projects with 80211.ac support, because it is very cheap, and very powerful. It allows NAT offloading and that means that the CLAT is not noticed (anyway, typically only 1% of the traffic goes thru the CLAT), and can provide 2Gpbs of IPv4/IPv6 routing. Mediatek is very good because they provide open SDKs, which other vendors don't do (so it makes very difficult to work with Open Source ...).
>
> I'm now working for a few customers on choosing the best SoC for 802.11ax with 2.5 and 5Gpbs support for the ethernet ports, as clearly, if you go for WiFi6, you need to have higher bw in the APs.
>
> Several of my customers have strategies for providing new CPEs based on (one or several may be combined):
> 1) We move you from DSL to GPON.
> 2) We provide you triple-play.
> 3) New customers get the new CPE.
> 4) Old customers will get it replaced when it fails or they look for 1 or 2 above.
> 5) We make an offer to old customers to replace the old CPE and get Gig ports and WiFi 6 (or even just 802.11ac if they have a previous technology), we even offer them a mesh system. This offer is extremely low cost, something like 20 USD or 1 USD per month for 2 years, etc. In fact this cover the full cost of the CPE and shipping to the customer!
> 6) etc.
>
> Of course, every new CPE has our firmware with 464XLAT. Those CPEs can cost between 15-30 USD, or if you want an extremely good one with the "best" WiFi you can go up to 40-60. Offering a pair of 2-3 with mesh could be like 100-150 USD for the complete set.
>
> What many operators don't realize is that with 464XLAT, your IPv4 traffic going thru the NAT64 will be 15-20% only and going down every year. This depends on the % of end-users vs enterprises. End users consume "more" IPv6-enbled services (social networks, NetFlix, Youtube, etc.). And when you have less and less NAT64 traffic, it means:
> 1) Lower cost for your NAT64 boxes (even if it can be extremely low cost if you use racked servers with Jool or other open source alternatives).
> 2) Lower number of IPv4 public addresses, so you could transfer them.
>
> Whith those savings, you could clearly pay for the cost of the CPEs!

If I had the cash, I'd pick up Mikrotik and bring them into the 21st 
century :-).

Mark.