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[kitz]

I *think* indicates you landed on BRAS Redback 2 in BTW's Slough

That would fit.
Historic naming of the bRAS has usually always indicated the type of equipment/number/location   eg

esr5.manchester5.broadband.bt.net  = Cisco ESR 
ERX3.Manchester2 = Juniper ERX

I think the acc-aln6.tw in mine is the MSE

A few years ago they purchased a large amount of Alcatel 7750's which were put to use as MSE bRAS.

[jelv]

There's been a post with more information about this:

Hi everyone,

Been a while since I've posted on here, been very busy working on the new network so I'd just like to try and clear up a few things about what we're doing here.

I'll start with timescales. The new network is being enabled geographically and by product and customers are being moved in batches each week using these and other selection criteria (we aren't moving customers that have an open fault or are in the process of upgrading to fibre for example). Until full national coverage is ready it makes it tricky to put new customers on so we're just electively moving existing customers for the time being until we've completed the coverage.

We've asked a few people to help out with testing and as we've run out of areas where we have staff members and I'd like to say thanks to those that said they will, it's really appreciated as it means we can get some feedback before we move thousands of people over. Next on the list is Cardiff next week and Edinburgh at the beginning of April.

Gateway hopping is now something that you won't see in the same way as the new network doesn't have gateways as such to hop between. On the old network your connection would be routed to the BT BRAS which would then in turn send the traffic to one of our gateways over L2TP where your PPP session terminates. On the new network the PPP session terminates on the BT BRAS instead and the traffic is simply IP over to us. Which is why you see a load of different hops in the traceroute, those hops are there on the old network but they are hidden because by the L2TP tunnel. The new network is built on 100Gbps technology too with multiple routes through the network which can change without having to gateway hop and therefore should be more seamless.

Also without having the gateways we're also removing a point of failure and piece of fragility - the L2TP session. There are certain types of maintenance work or certain types of outage that can cause a drop of the L2TP session meaning from a customer point of view they have to wait for their router to detect the session is down and re-establish it, in most cases that's quite quick but on the new network because we now see IP traffic the session won't drop and the traffic just fails over to another route without anyone noticing.

As the PPP session terminates on the BT BRAS the IP address that you are assigned is given by the BT BRAS, depending on how many customers we have on the BRAS you're on you're likely to see very similar IP addresses, even the same IP address each time you disconnect and reconnect. We provide BT a big pool of IPs and they divvy them out to each BRAS based on how many customers we have on each one. Even on the old network you'd still be connecting to the same BT BRAS every time just now we're having the BRAS give you the IP address instead of having it pass the traffic on to our gateways.

Let me know if there's anything else that needs clarifying and I'll try and clear it up.     

Regards,
Dave Tomlinson
PlusNet Network Services

[kitz]

Thanks for posting that jelv.

The new network is being enabled geographically

TBH I think that is quite wise and Im sure that I said such at the beginning, that its better if they can to do it in stages.
   
When moving from IPStream to WBC, Enta did it all at once and it became quite disruptive for many as some of the PoPs groaned and users complained about lack of bandwidth.   Although PN arent using WBC -  WBMC Dedicated is more like WBC in many ways than it is to WBMC shared..  so this way they should be able to react quicker if there are any issues. 

[jelv]

There's more information on the linked topic.

Apparently those on fixed IPs will still be terminated on the BNG's via L2TP and hence won't see any change to their tracert.

20CN users will not go on to the new network.

[renluop]

There's more information on the linked topic.

Apparently those on fixed IPs will still be terminated on the BNG's via L2TP and hence won't see any change to their tracert.

20CN users will not go on to the new network.

Another likely dippy question! What will happen to anyone going fixed IP, who is on the new network; will they stay or revert back to BNG via L2TP?

[jelv]

You've not understood: people on fixed IPs will be moved to the new network but instead of the session being terminated on the BT BRAS it will be tunnelled through and terminated on a BNG.

[renluop]

Please forgive age and stupidity!

[jelv]

This is a copy of a post I've just made on the Plusnet Community forums
(link)

Progress of migration to new network (from WBMC Shared to WBMC dedicated)

Re: Planned Network Maintenance - Tuesday 1st November 01:00 - 06:00

These regular service posts obviously relate to the migration of users on to the new network as intimated by the cryptic

Possibly. As part of this maintenance some customers will be disconnected from the Internet. Any customers disconnected should reconnect automatically elsewhere on the network.

I've been watching the progress of this project since it started at the beginning of the year (I get to see the collated users online graphs). As people are moved to the new network they disappear from the graph. I presume those on fixed IPs still appear on the graph as they still connect to the bng's. Allowing for continued growth in customer numbers it appears that in excess of 500,000 users are now on the new network.

{See attached image "Users online year.png"}

What can also be seen is the pause in early August when they finally put the migrations on hold while they sorted out the packet loss issues.

The weekly graph for this week is also quite revealing:

{See attached image "users online week.png"}

What can clearly be seen is that around 25,000 users were moved to the new network in the maintenance slot in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
We don't know where this will bottom out as we don't know how many users in total are on fixed IPs, but guessing from the figures it looks like another 4 or 5 months to complete the program if they carry on at the current rate.

Decommissioned gateways

Another observation is that it appears that gateways pcl-bng04 and ptw-bng02 have been decommissioned. I posted a bit back asking if anyone was on those gateways (no-one replied to say they were). Recently I've noticed that there seem to be no users on ptn-ag2. It looks also as if ptw-ag02 may be decommissioned soon as well.