Reposting so Cory can see the beginning of the thread. From: Ken Hohhof Sent: Friday, November 16, 2018 1:38 PM To: 'AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group' Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Calix Gigacenters - how difficult to implement?
So do you just run them standalone like any other router, managing them via the embedded web interface? Does this mean the customer doesn’t get a portal the tells them their usage and that Johnny has been downloading a Playstation game for the past 12 hours and hogging all the bandwidth and other customer self-help stuff like that? Or am I imagining that was a feature? Just an embedded interface that shows the MAC addresses of all the WiFi devices and their signal strength and modulation is no big deal, most consumer routers can do that now, lots of them have apps for your phone now. From: AF <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Joe Novak Sent: Friday, November 16, 2018 1:11 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Calix Gigacenters - how difficult to implement? +1 for Consumer connect being expensive. There is several other TR69 complaint router management vendors, that do have direct support for the Gigacenter. Affinegy.com is one we looked at, RNControl(ReadyNet) has the ability to also do a 'bring your own router' to their TR-069 platform. There is at least one more that had a setup too, I just can't think of the name.. The thing I like about the Calix, which we had trouble with in other platforms, is stability. The damn things just WORK. Zyxel, Readynet, Cambium, all had weird problems where after a week or two they could no longer be managed and required a reboot. Wifi issues. I never had the same problems with the Calix at home or at work. I ran it for about a month at home before we started deploying customers. Readynet/Zyxel/Cambium had some varying degree of annoyances, if it was either management locking up, or wifi disappearing - device locking up for no reason? Calix is the only one that lasted a month without crashing in some way shape or form. I don't really have the time or want to track down vendors problems. Not to say any of the vendors have terrible support, but there isn't enough time in the day. We are also using Calix in our FTTH, but the whole pushing people to use consumer connect rubbed us the wrong way too. Would rather put in a dumb ONT and bridge it with a 844E behind it. Joe On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 12:55 PM Carl Peterson <[email protected]> wrote: We don't use the calix cloud (consumer connect or whatever its called these days) We do run CMS, but I'm not using it with our 844GEs. It thought this was possible, but they are really pushing people to pay them for consumer connect. We do pay for support which includes CMS and they can be pretty arbitrary on pricing. I think they just make it up as they go. We run a lot of GPON on E7-2s with 844G and GE ONTs. Easy to allow remote access from the E7-2 for management if needed. (We run 844GEs in active ethernet fiber MDUS to start, then move them over to GPON once we get fiber to the building or get enough customers in the building to justify an E7-2 and GPON card in the building). In Active ethernet mode, they are kind of a PITA. They will randomly lose their WAN VLAN settings and go back to their smart activate config. I have 844Es in the lab, (shout out to Calix for sending them to me for free for my lab), and used one at home as a test router for awhile. Big drawback of the 844E is that their cloud is expensive and there doesn't seem to be a free/cheap on-site version like CnMaestro. Routers do seem to work better then CnPilots. We are still using CnPilots for our coper MDU and CSM customer. I prefer the performance of the 844E, but their cloud is too expensive, at least for us (other people have ball parked much better pricing then they quote us), and there doesn't seem to be a free/cheap on-site version like CnMaestro. You can run them just like a regular router, except that you have a customer side interface and a provider side interface. You can create a golden config file and load it onto all your routers if you have defaults you want. They do support tr69 so you can roll them into your own management solution later if you like but you don't have to use it. On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 9:52 AM Ken Hohhof <[email protected]> wrote: For those of you who’ve successfully deployed Calix: I’ve been wanting to do something with the 844E and 804 since WISPAmerica 2.5 years ago, but I feel like I’m at the starting line of a marathon with my feet stuck in buckets full of concrete. Calix has tons of documentation, and after reading it, I feel about 1% smarter. I don’t know what the end user or a tech sees as an interface for analytics and troubleshooting and tweaking settings. I don’t know if you can do a standalone implementation with just the Calix Cloud and some Gigacenters and Mesh units, I get the impression you need to mess with APIs and tie into all sorts of operations systems that we don’t have. I’m not even clear on whether we need to set up some kind of on-network TR-069 server, or if that’s all a cloud service hosted by Calix. Is the Calix stuff relatively straightforward to use, on a par with Cambium cnPilot and cnMaestro Cloud? And maybe Calix documentation is just very confusing or I’m being stupid? Or are these things pretty complicated to incorporate into a WISP network and get all the advantages of the devices and cloud management? I’m trying to decide whether to keep struggling and get more help from Calix, or give up. -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- Carl Peterson PORT NETWORKS 401 E Pratt St, Ste 2553 Baltimore, MD 21202 (410) 637-3707 -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- AF mailing list [email protected] http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
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