[AusNOG] Cisco 887VA vs Cisco 867VAE

[Reuben Farrelly]

On 3/11/2015 12:21 PM, Matt Carter wrote:
> NBNCo have an 887 and an ISR 2911 synced up ok but in my experience the
> 867VAE is not compatible with Alcatel ISAM7330 VDSL DSLAM in use by
> NBNCo and of course the 887 is EOS. 867VAE will get to showtime using
> VDSL profile 17a but noise margin on D1/D2/D3 is 0.0db and link will
> immediate go into UAS and subsequent retrain, resulting in a ongoing
> link flap condition. The DSLAM shows an error establishing G933.2 but
> offers no further information. I tried a few different firmware
> including the latest (35j_23jE) but I just couldn’t get it to sync up
> properly. Anyone????

I suspect that might be similar to the problems I had when I deployed 
the 867VAE in NZ.  I think - but stand to be corrected -  that Chorus NZ 
have deployed Alcatel Lucent gear in curbside cabinets there, as the 
place where this one is installed is quite far from an exchange yet it's 
seeing only 12db of margin and 3-4db of attenuation on ADSL2+ (showing 
as attaintable 22Mbit/s line speed).  The suburb also has VDSL available 
for order.

The 867VAE reports the far end chipset as IKNS (Ikanos) not Broadcom 
though.  TAC said that an Interleave of 16ms and INP enabled on the line 
were likely the main cause of the slow trainup as the line itself is 
very good.  When it does train up eventually it gets very good line 
speeds and no one dares touch or restart it - it's just the initial poor 
speed of the trainup (sometimes 1 minute, sometimes up to an hour) that 
is a problem.

It seems like all of these problems are probably fixable via firmware so 
it's interesting that the subsequent variants of these units now do 
support firmware updates.  Perhaps Cisco realised that it was a mistake 
to not build the upgrade support in.

Reuben