[AusNOG] Experiences with PPPoE on MX5 or ASR1K

[Scott O'Brien]

G'Day all,

I'm often lurking on list but don't often post.  I'm building a little setup soon for a small ISP overseas and am hoping to get opinions in peoples experience running a PPPoE server on either the MX5 or Cisco ASR1001-X routers.  I know that Juniper have had issues with PPPoE in the past with this platform but I believe that's all sorted now?  I can't seem to find much by the way of how many subscribers can be terminated on these platforms in spec sheets when traffic shaping would be being used on each session.  Would I be a little optimistic expecting upwards of 4K users on either of these boxes?

Before I start a war of not using PPPoE because straight IPoE is better and being used more and more, I was thinking it'd be much easier for a small scale shop to support this by simply extending a L2 domain for their customers (with appropriate L2 security) than having to worry about where to place route-points to get meaningful information in DHCP option 82 relays.

Hoping that someone who works a bit more with Juniper and this platform could answer if I'd be able to run a PPPoE server on the MX5 instead of forking out for the MX80 (not needing the interfaces or bandwidth )?  It looks like the licences (S-MX80-SA-FP, S-MX80-SSM-FP from https://www.juniper.net/techpubs/en_US/junos13.2/topics/reference/general/mx-series-software-license-features.html) only lists the MX80 as the supported device?

I'm also wondering what peoples experiences are running either of these platforms on the border regarding receiving the full routing table possibly from a few different upstream providers.  I believe both these boxes can handle ~ 1.5 million routes?

I've not done much either by the way of hunting for distributors (either local or in the US) to start getting an idea on pricing yet.  Is this something this list could possibly help out with?  I know the charter says it's for exchanging technical information, so perhaps content regarding distributor contacts would be better suited to contact me off-list?

Thanks,
- Scott O'Brien