[HN Gopher] Killing the ISP Appliance: An eBPF/XDP Approach to D...
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Killing the ISP Appliance: An eBPF/XDP Approach to Distributed BNG
Author : chaz6
Score : 56 points
Date : 2026-01-23 17:29 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (markgascoyne.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (markgascoyne.co.uk)
| Guestmodinfo wrote:
| Can Iran like internet ban happen? i feel the answer is no. We
| can finally escape govt sponsored censorship
| direwolf20 wrote:
| It can always happen. The government would just have to arrest
| everyone who doesn't comply, like they do in Iran.
| pstuart wrote:
| That could _never_ happen here /s
| modernpacifist wrote:
| The [ONT - OLT(+BNG)] - Internet] sections of the paths will
| continue to be owned by commercial entities that can still be
| the subject of court orders and/or government pressure.
|
| Even if you were to roll your own cable in the ground to your
| own ONT/OLT/BNG at some point you will need to acquire IP
| transit or peering from other commercial entities.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| The latter usually isn't that difficult, just expensive. You
| can usually rent a leased line from anywhere to anywhere. The
| government will still come knocking if they think you're
| evading their censorship.
| modernpacifist wrote:
| A leased line though will only get you A<->B where sure, A
| and B can be anywhere but have to be concrete
| locations/hand off points when provisioned. It does
| ultimatley come down to the service that one orders from a
| commercial entity.
|
| A hypothetical court order saying something like "kill
| internet access" would likely cause an IP transit service
| to stop working (implemented by said provider no longer
| announcing global IP routing tables to that service) but a
| leased line between two locations would likely remain
| untouched since that isn't an "internet" service. So they
| might not need to come knocking if they're reasonably
| confident that all such edge cases like leased lines end up
| at dead-ends because any internet-capable product they
| might be enabling access to is sufficiently disabled.
|
| I do imagine though that if they get as far as "kill the
| internet" that obtaining a subsequent court order to go
| after some suspicious leased line would be trivial.
|
| As a side note, I find that IP transit is typically the
| cheapest aspect of providing an internet service since a
| cross-connect at a well connected DC will cost well under
| $1/Mbps/month unmetered. Plus the cost is very well
| amortized when residential users are the target. This has
| tended to hold when one takes into account the co-lo costs
| as well since network gear doing relatively basic packet
| forwarding/internet table routing doesn't take up that much
| space or power.
| genpfault wrote:
| Because TFA never bothered to define it:
|
| Broadband Network Gateway (BNG)[1]
|
| [1]: https://github.com/codelaboratoryltd/bng#bng-broadband-
| netwo...
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Is it the FTTX equivalent of a BRAS?
| chaz6 wrote:
| Yes, exactly. BRAS is functionally the same as BNG.
| bigwheels wrote:
| Thanks! "OLT" was also new to me. In case others find it
| helpful:
|
| > OLT = Optical Line Terminal.
|
| > In ISP fiber (typically GPON/EPON) infrastructure, it's the
| provider-side device at the central office/headend that
| terminates and controls the passive optical network: it
| connects upstream into the ISP's aggregation/core network and
| downstream via fiber (through splitters) to many customers'
| ONTs/ONUs, handling PON line control, provisioning, QoS, and
| traffic aggregation.
| joshbaptiste wrote:
| Thanks.. was reading the article like WTF is "BNG"
| lormayna wrote:
| I have been worked for a regional ISP 10 years ago and having an
| architecture like that one, would be a godsend. With centralized
| BNGs we were not able to apply upstream QoS policies for
| subscribers on the backhaulings and we had to apply policies on
| DSLAM access ports.
|
| We ended using a couple of cheap Mikrotik as PPPoE concentrators
| for every access room, in a similar way as you did. But the
| reliability of Mikrotik routers was not the best
| binome wrote:
| I'm curious as to what actually is the CPU <-> NPU bandwidth in
| these whitebox OLTs? Traditionally that has been sized for small
| amounts of punted control plane packets, then programming a fast
| path into the NPU for revenue traffic.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Sounds like a really cool endeavour. I had no idea that ISP
| infrastructure was so heavily centralised. Hope the author
| succeeds in their quest to improve on this. I love that they're
| using simpler, cheaper hardware for this. Essentially, it sounds
| like it could reduce vendor lock-in for ISPs.
| dontdoxxme wrote:
| The code is mostly vibe coded and under the BSL. I think the
| interesting bit here is a single developer can write something
| like this with an agent. Does it make sense to open source such a
| thing or just each ISP write their own to their requirements?
|
| I also don't get the focus on handling DHCP renewals in the
| kernel fast path. With 2000 subscribers per OLT and say a 5
| minute lease time that's only a few renewals a second.
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(page generated 2026-01-23 23:00 UTC)