Adtran Equipment

themagicone

Does anyone have any opinions on Adtran routers and other equipment? I've been reselling Cisco, pushing their products and learning them. But with the new G2 line of ISR's, the bull-#### of licensing now and so on, they are getting way to expensive. I had a chance to work on some Adtran routers and I am blown away by the features on them. Not mention their fanless (BIG points for products going into a small office). Free certification and more.

I ordered my first one for a customer this week. Little excited to see how well they work. If the one I picked up does everything it says it can do I think my journey with Cisco might be put on hold.

N2IT

Drkats has had experience using and implementing these routers and switches. I would reach out to him.

networker050184

I've worked with them and ran into a few bugs, but that's nothing that any other vendor doesn't have as well. I wouldn't have a problem using them for something very simple, but if I wanted something feature rich I'd definitely go with Cisco/Juniper. The support from Adtran was lacking compared to the other big players from my experience. You don't want to get caught out with very little help from the vendor when trying to implement a complex set up.

shodown

When I worked for a SP we had a lot of them. Pretty solid devices for on premise gear. Not sure how I feel about them in the enterprise.

themagicone

I am more so looking at them for the 1 to 25 user office market. For larger complex projects Cisco is still the way to go. Just hard to get a office of 10 people to buy a $1500 router from Cisco when a $500 Adtran will work.

networker050184

Sounds like you shouldn't have any issues with something like that to me. Have you looked into the SRX line from Juniper? Could be another option for you.

shodown

I was going to say the UC5XX product line which has voice, wireless, and security all built into 1 box.


Think about the feature set. I'm not sure with the Adtran's all we did was statics on those boxes

drkat

ADTRAN is good stuff... They actually build Central Office grade equipment (DSLAMS, MUX's etc) - the CPE gear is great too. We have multiple customers running 6355's as core L3 switches handling 50+ vpn connections + voip + data so.. they're solid.


I love them for especially voip deployments and SIP Trunking

Just a note on support

You can have different SLA's with ADTRAN so my opinion is, site down... 1 hour call back which wasnt too shabby

elderkai

I've used their Atlas 550a and configured them as Frame-Relay switches. Good stuff. That's all the experience I've had with them though.

networker050184

drkat wrote: »

Just a note on support

You can have different SLA's with ADTRAN so my opinion is, site down... 1 hour call back which wasnt too shabby

On the support note, I worked on one of the largest networks in the world using these as CPE, and we definitely had the highest support contract available. It has a lot less to do with response time and lot more to do with knowledgable engineers with the resources to figure your problem out. It doesn't matter if they can get back to you in an hour if they can't solve your issue. It took months for them to figure out an issue we had (actually I figured it out) and tell me I have to wait a couple months for a new code release as nothing current could fix it!

it_consultant

themagicone wrote: »

Does anyone have any opinions on Adtran routers and other equipment? I've been reselling Cisco, pushing their products and learning them. But with the new G2 line of ISR's, the bull-#### of licensing now and so on, they are getting way to expensive. I had a chance to work on some Adtran routers and I am blown away by the features on them. Not mention their fanless (BIG points for products going into a small office). Free certification and more.

I ordered my first one for a customer this week. Little excited to see how well they work. If the one I picked up does everything it says it can do I think my journey with Cisco might be put on hold.

I think you will find few substantive differences between Ad Tran and Cisco in the types of environment you have described. To the point about being fanless, I have seen people unplug the things because they thought they weren't on and they thought they had gone bad. Ad trans are very popular CPE devices because of their low cost and almost bulletproof reliability.

Right now I am on the Brocade bandwagon. I did a competitive quote against Cisco and Brocade won on features, support, and price. I think you will find that, in essence, most equipment (including small manufacturers like zhone) is essentially the same. With Cisco, you are basically paying more to get green spraypaint. With Juniper you pay to get the netscreen binaries. With Palo Alto, you pay for the prestige of spending WAY too much on a firewall.

drkat

networker050184 wrote: »

On the support note, I worked on one of the largest networks in the world using these as CPE, and we definitely had the highest support contract available. It has a lot less to do with response time and lot more to do with knowledgable engineers with the resources to figure your problem out.

I'll be honest.. i've ran into the same thing with cisco - it depends who you get