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2025

The Art of Traceroute

One of Sun Tzu's lesser known works is his “The Art of War” follow-up, “The Art of Traceroute”.

Of course, that's a joke, and it doesn't actually exist. I can and will have a good go at writing an equivalent in this article though!

BNG Article #1 — VPP and DPDK HQoS

Broadband Network Gateways (BNGs) are the source of plenty of controversy in the telco industry. They are the magic smoke-and-mirror boxes that you have to pay a lot of money for, almost all of which are massively over-specified and overpriced for the needs and means of a small ISP. There is a huge dead-zone in the market for BNGs that can handle more than 500 subscribers but less than 20,000 subscribers simultaneously, and in general the industry is very focused on hyperscale-sized companies. Juniper, Cisco, Nokia, rtBrick and various vBNG solutions are all guilty of taking this approach — and many engineers are cognisant of the massive drop in software quality from big vendors over the last decade in spite of the large price-tags they're commanding.

In reality, all these devices are is a standard router with some hacks thrown in to handle some telco-specific problems. Ok that might be trivialising it a bit, but let's dig into what we can do without the big vendors' solutions.

ACCC Measuring Broadband Reports

For the international readers, the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) is a Consumer Protection focused regulatory body at the level of Federal Government in Australia. In 2018, they began publishing reports related to comparing performance between various Retail Service Providers (or ISPs) on the nbn (National Broadband Network) and other fixed-line customer access networks in Australia. The ACCC has contracted SamKnows (owned by Cisco) to orchestrate the testing and collection of data that is used to produce these reports, SamKnows performs these tests by selectively distributing a testing device to Australian internet users on an opt-in basis and having them plug the device into their local network at home.

Within Australia these reports have a questionable reputation at best amongst the Network Engineering community, we'll explore why this is so in this post.