Found: One Troll

Warning: this post is going to contain a lot of nonsense from my industry.

Arris is the H und K of the cable networking world. If you have cable internet, you’ve probably never heard of Arris, but it’s nearly certain that your service provider uses their products. If you have cable telephone, unless it’s FTTP, you likely have an Arris cable telephony box somewhere in your home or your home’s cable demarc. Their customer premise equipment isn’t so bad, but their head end/CO equipment is terrible.

Now, even though Arris makes cable modems for end users (and just last month shipped their 20 millionth phone-enabled modem), you, as a cable subscriber, can’t buy one. Arris doesn’t sell cable modems to end users, only to cable operators or MSOs. If you want to buy one in order to avoid leasinga modem from your cable company, tough shit. They won’t sell you one. Find another telephony cable modem.

Arris is notorious for poor quality control. Not a week goes by that we don’t have to RMA one of Arris’s interface cards or power supplies or some other damn thing. On the other hand, we have the same amount of Nortel equipment and roughly three times as much Cisco equipment in our network, and I can count on one hand the number of times we have to replace parts for that gear in one year. Most of our Cisco equipment runs its entire service life without needing any sort of repair. I can’t say that for a single one of nearly 100 installed Arris CMTSs.

In addition, Arris equipment costs at least twice as much per subscriber compared to any other vendor. When I first saw the cost of a Cisco UBR10k, I thought it was ridiculous. Then I realized that it supports comfortably three times as many subscribers as the largest Arris CMTS, which costs nearly as much. The UBR also performs actual IP and IPv6 routing and supports industry-standard features like Etherchanneling and QOS marking and scheduling. And when you compare prices for upgrading that equipment to support DOCSIS 3.0, the balance is even less favorable for Arris.

Arris’s software isn’t anything to be proud of either. Like pretty much everyone else in the industry, the interface is a shell for some sort of *NIX platform. Like everyone else, configuration is stored and entered in sort of modular nested sections. Unlike everyone else’s implementation, if you enter the configuration out of order, it wipes everything in that section and you get to start over. Change an IP address on an interface, and it helpfully wipes the rest of that interface’s configuration for you. Oops, I hope you didn’t want that. Make a change to the routing protocol? There’s a 50/50 chance you’ll have to reboot the active CPU once or twice to make your change take effect. You won’t know it needs to be rebooted until you start experiencing issues with the unit. The issues might not even be related to the change you made, but they will have begun when you changed the config and they’ll end when you reset the CPU. It’s a good thing you’ve got redundant processing engines!

Which brings us to the one good thing Arris has going. Their built-in high-availability is top-notch. Because it has to be, or else every time one of their linecards failed their customers would have an outage on their hands lasting as long as it took to get replacement parts. Arris would probably tell you that their hardware redundancy is so awesome that you can perform maintenance in the middle of the day without affecting customers. That claim would be true, which I know because I’ve had to perform emergency maintenance on their equipment in the middle of the day. More than once. In the same week.

Now you might wonder,”Eseell, if the equipment and the customer service suck so hard, why do you buy them?” Well, I don’t get to make those decisions. I just have to make it work as best I can.