NCS 540 Fronthaul

[jm-barreto]

Greetings

I am looking for a router that I can use as a PE that has more than 2 100G ports. I am currently using the NCS 540. I saw the NCS 540 Fronthaul model and I think it is ideal for what I need. But I have doubts about this equipment since it is Cloud RAN. And I wanted to know if I can use it as PE. I have a small MPLS network and I only do L2transport, MPLS LDP and soon Segment Routing. According to the features, it has everything I need but I have doubts about CRAN and CPRI option 3-8 capability, if these features could conflict with the role of PE.

I would appreciate any information you can provide us.

[filopeter]

As far as I know N540-FH-AGG-SYS supports the existing routing and switching feature-set of the NCS540 portfolio.
The only difference is that 24 x 1/10/25G ports are called universal, as they are capable of Ethernet and/or CPRI transport.

[Ramblin Tech]

That is correct, the fronthaul product line essentially adds an FPGA to the NCS 540 product line to map/de-map CPRI traffic in RoE frames for packet-based transport. Conceivably, FPGA code could also be loaded to provide a gateway function to interwork the CPRI stream into proprietary eCPRI or Low-PHY, but the RAN (Radio Access Network) vendor would have to provide the technical details on the coding used by their proprietary Radio Units and BBUs. The hope is that O-RAN will someday eliminate the need for proprietary details.