Start here · the five-minute version

Introduction · Read This First

Your whole edge, on servers you already buy.

Right now your subscriber edge is probably four or five boxes from four or five vendors: a BNG, a CGNAT appliance, something scrubbing DDoS, a shelf doing QoS, and whatever handles IPv6 transition. Each has its own licence, its own CLI, its own support contract and its own failure modes. BNGSOFT is all of them, in one data plane, on a commodity x86 server.

XDP/eBPF data plane

not five appliances

~64k

subscribers per server

full feature set on

~$0.30

per subscriber

hardware, ex-licence

calls home

forwarding never depends on us

This page is the short version. It exists because there is a lot to read and you should not have to guess where to start. Five minutes here, then the last section routes you to whichever brief matches the problem you actually have.

1 · What it replaces

The edge got built one problem at a time. Subscribers needed terminating, so you bought a BNG. IPv4 ran out, so you bought CGNAT. Attacks arrived, so you bought scrubbing. Someone complained about gaming latency, so you bought a QoS box. Every one of those is a separate purchase, a separate rack unit, a separate thing to upgrade at 2am, and a separate place for traffic to be copied, queued and delayed.

The consolidation is the product. Every function above runs in the same XDP program on the same server, so a packet is classified, policed, translated and queued once — not copied between five appliances that each add latency and each need their own upgrade window.

2 · What runs in the one data plane

Subscriber access & AAA

PPPoE and IPoE termination, RADIUS with CoA, per-plan policy, Q-in-Q. The BNG functions you are replacing, without the chassis.

Carrier-grade NAT

Port-block allocation that does not drop live connections, deterministic reverse lookup for abuse complaints, and full-cone behaviour that does not break gaming or RTC.

Edge security

BCP38 anti-spoof validated on every packet, DDoS protection in the data plane rather than a separate scrubber, and abuse containment that blocks the attack rather than the customer.

Quality of service

Per-subscriber and hierarchical shaping, VLAN groups, application-aware treatment — enforced at line rate in the same pass as everything else.

Latency under load

L4S dual-queue AQM and Interactive Flow Protection, so calls, games and ACKs stay fast while the line is saturated. This is the complaint your NOC cannot currently answer.

IPv6 and transition

Native dual-stack, prefix delegation, DS-Lite, MAP-E/MAP-T and NAT64 — four engines in one datapath, so you can stop buying IPv4 per subscriber.

3 · What NOC2 adds

The data plane is half of it. The other half is that somebody has to run this at 3am. NOC2 is the operations platform that comes with the gateways: one console for the fleet, subscriber triage that answers is it them, their line, or us, alerting ranked by who is actually affected rather than by which box is loudest, a wall-board for the NOC, and a public status page for your customers.

The part operators notice first. Most monitoring tells you a server is down, which is rarely the hard part. The hard part is that six alerts are open, two are gateways nobody ever connected, one was drained deliberately, and one is carrying live subscribers right now. Ranking those correctly is the job.

4 · What it costs against what you have

The honest comparison is not licence against licence — it is total edge against total edge, because consolidation is where the money is. Fewer boxes means less rack, less power, fewer spares, fewer upgrade windows and fewer support contracts.

Model, not a quote. 50,000 subscribers over 36 months; electricity at ~$0.12/kWh with a ~1.5× cooling multiplier; BNGSOFT build = 3 × 1U E810 nodes. Your rates and hardware will differ — the shape is what transfers, not the decimal places.

What the alternatives cost

Approach	Hardware	Software / licence	Rack & boxes
Router appliances e.g. MikroTik CCR2216 fleet	~US$2,200–2,800 each ~$37–45k for ~16 units	RouterOS included	~18U · ~19 boxes
Carrier chassis Cisco ASR 9000, Nokia 7750 SR	Six-figure chassis plus line cards; price on application	Per-feature licensing plus an annual support contract	Chassis + spares
BNGSOFT	~$2.5k (1U, 10G) to ~$9k (2U, 200G) ~$0.14–0.37 per subscriber	Per quote — ask us by email	3U · 3 boxes

We do not publish a competitor's chassis price and neither should anyone else. Chassis pricing is quoted per deal, discounted per customer and bound by the paper you signed — any figure printed in a vendor brochure is a guess dressed as a fact. The MikroTik and NIC figures above are public retail prices, sourced in the footnote. For Cisco and Nokia, put our number next to your quote, which is the only comparison that is actually true.

Our licence price: ask us.

There is no price list here because there is no useful single number — it depends on subscriber count, which functions you turn on, and whether you are replacing one box or an estate. Tell us those three things and you get a real figure back, not a range.

Send subscriber count, peak throughput and which functions you need. We will size the build, quote the licence, and tell you what hardware to buy from whoever you normally buy hardware from.

Email sales@bngsoft.com for a quote

5 · Proof, not promises

Every vendor claims performance. The difference is whether the claim states its method well enough for you to reproduce it or catch it being wrong. Three we publish in full:

50 Mpps, features on

Measured with PPPoE, CGNAT, hQoS and ACLs all enabled — 33.6 Gbps at 64-byte frames, the hardest test there is. Most datasheets quote a headline Gbps and omit the frame size, which makes the figure unfalsifiable.

3.21 Mbps busy hour

What a real subscriber actually consumes at peak, measured on production gateways rather than assumed. 80% of measured gateways fall between 2.66 and 3.65 Mbps — which is the number your sizing should use.

4,400 subscribers, 2016 server

Running on a decade-old box, with headroom left. Included because it is the least flattering framing we could publish and it still holds.

6 · Where to read next

There are more than eighty briefs behind this page. You do not need most of them. Pick the one that matches the problem you came here with:

Replacing a chassis BNG?

Moving Off a Chassis BNG →
vs Cisco ASR 9000 & Nokia 7750 →

Out of IPv4?

Carrier-Grade NAT →
Four Engines, One Datapath →

Sizing a build?

Hardware, NICs & a Calculator →
Packet Rate First →

Security review or procurement?

Nothing Calls Home →
Attack Surface & Patch Cadence →

Subscribers complaining it is slow?

The Low-Latency Suite →
Is It Them, Their Line, or Us? →

Running a NOC?

NOC2 Operations Platform →
Know Before The Phone Rings →

Comparing vendors properly?

The Questions That Make Numbers Comparable →
Full Capability Catalogue →

Satellite or fixed wireless?

BNGSOFT for Satellite →
Latency Is the Queue, Not the Orbit →

Or skip the reading. A proof of concept runs on your own hardware against your own subscriber traffic. Nothing to ship, no rebuild of your edge, and you keep the result whichever way it goes.

Sources and assumptions. MikroTik CCR2216 ~US$2,200–2,800 each (retail listings, June 2026, mikrotik.com). NIC street prices: Intel X710-DA2 ~$200–300, E810-CQDA2 ~$700–900, NVIDIA ConnectX-6 Dx ~$965–1,400 (vendor datasheets and FS.com). Three-year model: 50,000 subscribers over 36 months, electricity ~$0.12/kWh with a ~1.5× cooling multiplier, BNGSOFT build = 3 × 1U E810 nodes; appliance fleet = ~16 NAS plus a CGNAT tier. Cisco and Nokia pricing is deliberately not stated: it is quoted per deal and any published figure would be invention. The ~$0.30 per subscriber figure is commodity-hardware guidance excluding the BNGSOFT licence. Performance figures are measured on production gateways with the full feature set enabled; see the sizing and performance briefs for method.