On Tue 2013-01-15 at 10:58 AM Nick Hilliard wrote:

> I don't get why people shouldn't be able to ping each other / etc.  Isn't
> this traffic functionally equivalent to any other Internet traffic?  What's
> different about it?

Easy - the Internet is a routed L3 infrastructure with security measures in 
place vs. an open L2 LAN. Ever done a packet capture off of an idle Windows 
machine? :(


> Yeah that's the reason. Its not about talking to one another, its about
> protecting from attacks that could allow snooping on traffic flows, to
> hijacking.

It should be. You're providing an Internet service, not a building-wide Windows 
"HomeGroup" or vessel for neighbors to watch each other's iTunes. For some 
reason people get very cranky if they can see their neighbor's printer. 
security is of course a real concern. Like NetBios of old there is a lot of 
multicast-based stuff that really shouldn't be let out of a LAN at all. This 
PeerDNS/Bonjour stuff really bugs the hell outta me. I'm very much in agreement 
with the opinion that almost all residential users should have a 
router/firewall, but customers won't be very sympathetic to that line of 
reasoning while their printer is spewing screenshots from 4chan that the kid up 
in 703 thought would be funny. Of course that's not to say people won't get 
cranky if their online banking session is hijacked - but you'll likely get a 
call about the former before the latter.

What you really need depends on a lot of variables as you haven't provided many 
requirements. Is this a data-only service or is triple-play with VoIP and IPTV? 
Will you provide CPE? What speeds are you selling your customers; 30 Mbps, 100 
Mbps, Gigabit? How much do you expect them to actually use, or what sort of 
oversubscription? PPPoE or plain IP? MPLS required? Where do you plan on being 
network- and bandwidth-wise in the next 3-5 years? Are there any special 
requirements for heat, power, or tight spaces? What are your redundancy and 
availability requirements? What's your budget?

As a PPPoE shop where we just give our customers a cable to plug into, I'm 
happy with some storm control, private VLANs, and ethertype filtering. If 
you're doing DHCP to your subscribers stuff gets really fun! Nick's list of 
features is a good one.

If I was in your shoes, in the market my employer serves, providing only 
Internet service, I'd be looking at a 2960-24TC-L on every storey with fiber to 
a couple of 3600X-24CX-24FSes or ME4924-10GEs hauling back to the POP, 
upgrading to 10G if/when necessary (I assume there's a pair of fibers to the 
building). Depending on where the POP is I might want MPLS. If power and space 
in the basement isn't a concern (doubtful, but you never know) I can get used 
6500s for pretty cheap which would make it a standard platform and nothing 
'special' for us to deal with.

Then again, if you want to push gigabit to all of your subscribers and 
everything is DHCP and your network is a lot of Layer 2, I might look at some 
of the telco edge vendors like Calix as well.


Hope this helps some!


- Ross

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