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.