Hi Neil,

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PPPOE Access Concentrator that can easily keep up with 100Mbit of PPPOE throughput at large sizes, and preferably all sizes. Any and all brands or thoughts considered.

Best bet is an ERX, for so many reasons. You could probably get away with a 7200 with an NPE-400 as a bare minimum, but you'd be happier with a NPE-G1 and almost certainly happiest with the ERX.

You could also look at the Cisco 10k series - much higher performance than the 7200/7300s for B-RAS applications. The NPE-G1 in a VXR or 7301 should be fine for just 100M of traffic though - even with small packets. I'd be interested in anyone's opinions of the 10k vs the ERX. When lab-testing the 10k a while back, it ran up to 60,000 subscribers and several gigs of traffic without a hitch. The ERX performed at a similar level - just with fewer subscribers, as the chassis have a lower limit. The ERX seemed to have the edge in feature set, however.

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In addition, who would be the best people to validate a bit of equipment for this requirement (assuming we don't end up buying calibrated and certified test gear).

Validate? People? Certification of the smartbits\ixia or of the router you'll be using? I don't recall ever having our test beds validated at the vendor I used to work for, course we never sold any routers either, so that's neither here nor there... ;-)

Well if you're going to buy Cisco or Juniper gear, they both have POC labs in Sydney which they're happy for prospective customers to use - if that's what you mean. They'll validate equipment specs and configs and suitability for a given purpose. Nortel and Redback also do this sort of gear, btw. Don't know much about it though.

Cheers, b

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