This is a compact selection of highly specialized webinars with VAS Experts and partners. Here you will find an overview of the past events and an announcement of the upcoming webinar.
Implementation of the BRAS Dual Stack on the X-COM network
Speaker: Roman Chuchuk, Deputy Director of X-COM Telecom. This is an Internet service provider in Aktau, Kazakhstan. More than thirty city districts are connected to his network.
The company has decided to introduce the BRAS function with IPv6 in order to simplify the management of its own network and improve the quality of customer service. For this purpose they chose SCAT system from VAS Experts. In his presentation Roman Ciuchuk shares his experience of the project implementation. The webinar can be seen as a quick guide for providers when setting up BRAS.
The speaker explains how the new function was implemented in X-COM. The transition to BRAS was smooth - one subnetwork and one neighbourhood at a time. Initially, the engineers deployed the L3 BRAS, so the Extreme switches had to be used at a lower level (in the network hierarchy) to terminate subscribers. However, the company later switched to L2 BRAS, which is already capable of operating in gateway mode and processing ARP requests.
BRAS connection diagram
In parallel with the implementation of BRAS, X-COM specialists reconfigured the IT infrastructure to work with the next-generation protocol. To do this, they reconfigured BGP and DNS servers, pre-allocating the available IPv6 address space for their tasks.
IPv6 address allocation scheme
Next, the company installed the BGPD daemon managing the network routing tables and configured the P2P networks to provide connectivity to the replica routers. In the case of DNS we had to modify configuration files to work with IPv6, set the value of rate-limit and PTR-record, which are used to connect the IP-address of the server with its canonical name.
The novel tells us that for a full transition to IPv6 they had to set up event monitoring via Radius. When X-COM allowed routers to send authorization requests via the new protocol, thousands of packets were received by Radius in a second.
IPv6 control menu in your personal cabinet
It turned out that many routers in the subscriber network were already ready to work with IPv6. And they simultaneously required configuration. In order to protect the network from uncontrolled traffic flows, engineers added a special switch to the subscriber's personal cabinet, which had to be activated to work with the new protocol.
It took about a year to implement the project, taking into account the improvements that were associated with the transition to L2 BRAS. But as a result, the company managed to reduce the number of broadcast domains, switch to IPv6 and increase the stability of the network by prioritizing traffic.
Other tops of the webinar:
- Comparison of BRAS solutions from Ericsson, Huawei and VAS Experts;
- Detailed analysis of SCAT DPI solution;
- Implementation of Wi-Fi Hotspot and implementation of CG-NAT;
- Connection and configuration of subscriber devices in the new network - on the example of the most common routers;
- Configuring Google Global Cache and providing connectivity to the IPv6 core.
Introduction of BRAS on the network of Etherway operator with Hydra billing
Speaker: Andrey Ermishin, engineer-architect of Etherway communication operator. It is a provider of home internet, digital TV and video surveillance services in Cheboksary. More than a thousand houses are connected to its network.
Etherway has set itself the task to implement BRAS and SCAT from VAS Experts in order to manage subscribers' tariff plan policies. Andrei Yermishin tells about the reasons for choosing SCAT and gives diagrams with the network architecture before and after migration to this solution.
Earlier Etherway provider used Ericsson SmartEdge SE100. But the hardware developer has stopped the technical support of his system, plus the equipment itself has become outdated - there were periodic breakdowns of network cards. That's why the engineers of the Cheboksary provider started looking for alternatives and stopped at the SCAT solution from VAS Experts. Its connection scheme looks like this:
Etherway network architecture with SCAT
After implementation of SCAT in Etherway, the first thing they did was to set up authorization, policy of polishing and provision of L3 services to subscribers - DHCP was deployed in the proxy mode. All requests received via DHCP protocol are retransmitted to Radius (which is based on Hydra). The billing already determines by itself what kind of subscriber it is, what type of authorization it has, what IP-address to assign to it and what services to provide.
In the case of DHCP L3, the subscriber receives an IP address from the DHCP server and via the routed network gets to SCAT in vlan92 (in the diagram above). After that it passes authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) in the billing system, and then gets to the border of the network with the subsequent access to the Internet.