On Fri, 2012-10-19 at 12:55 -0500, Simon Westlake wrote: > I completely agree and I think it is a goal the WISP industry needs to > work towards - the provisioning of CPE is still a nightmare in > comparison to DOCSIS. PPPoE is not a good solution, IMO - it's arguably > better than nothing but you shouldn't have to rely on the customer > supplied equipment being configured correctly to just auth to the > network - that's the job of the ISP CPE.
In some regards, I agree with your take on this. It isn't really fair to compare ethernet-like protocols that WISPs use to DOCSIS, though. DOCSIS is it's own transport and one of the things that was built into the standard is authentication. That is not so with ethernet-like protocols. There IS some level of authentication available for this purpose, however. We can use radio/AP authentication based on MAC addresses of radios, which offers at least a small amount of security. We have SOME proprietary protocol devices, such as Canopy, AirMAX and nstreme, that offer various levels of security and authentication mechanisms (most are still MAC-based). The problem is that even with this authentication, it is still not provisioning. The main issue to contend with regarding provisioning is the difference between physical connectivity (Cables) vs RF connectivity that requires SOME configuration in the CPE to even allow it to connect in the first place. There are a number of methods to provide CPE provisioning beyond that first step, which ARE easy to accomplish. > It's not even that hard of a problem to solve in the grand scheme of things. This is true. If there were only some software company that would come up with a way to make this easier and add some level of security into the mix.... :-) -- ******************************************************************** * Butch Evans * Professional Network Consultation * * http://www.butchevans.com/ * Network Engineering * * http://store.wispgear.net/ * Wired or Wireless Networks * * http://blog.butchevans.com/ * ImageStream, Mikrotik and MORE! * * NOTE THE NEW PHONE NUMBER: 702-537-0979 * ******************************************************************** _______________________________________________ Wireless mailing list Wireless@wispa.org http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless