Huawei, ZTE, Nokia, Alcatel Lucent, Fiberhome Network Hardware Store

Hello everyone! I have a customer with low amount of ONTs in his ISP. He has between 2500 ~ 3000 ONTs and doesn’t have NCE or any other NMS to manage his ONTs and home gateways using TR-069 protocol.

This customer has an MA5800 X15 with 3x H903GPSF and 1x H901GPUF. I suggested him to install an ACS server in a SBC (Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, or others), because this is a very low-cost scenario. It’s great for testing, but I don’t know if this is possible.

 

In this link of GenieACS forum, the participants said that the minimum system requirements to run GenieACS are 3GB of RAM and dual core CPU, in this case, the Raspberry Pi 4 and Banana Pi M5 have Hardware to spare as we see below:

Raspberry Pi 4’s Hardware:

·         Broadcom BCM2711, Quad core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5GHz, 2GB, 4GB or 8GB LPDDR4-3200 SDRAM (depending on model). (relevant spec).

·         Gigabit Ethernet (relevant spec).

·         2.4 GHz and 5.0 GHz IEEE 802.11ac wireless, Bluetooth 5.0, BLE (not very relevant specifications).

·         2 USB 3.0 ports; 2 USB 2.0 ports. (not relevant spec).

·         2 × micro-HDMI ports (up to 4kp60 supported). (not relevant spec).

·         H.265 (4kp60 decode), H264 (1080p60 decode, 1080p30 encode) OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.0 (not relevant spec).

·         And another irrelevants specs…

 

Banana Pi M5’s Hardware: (At half Raspberry Pi 4 price)

·         Amlogic S905X3 Quad core Cortex-A55 (2.0xxGHz)

·         Mali-G31 GPU (not relevant spec).

·         4GB LPDDR4

·         16GB eMMC flash (cool spec)

·         4 USB 3.0 (not relevant spec).

·         1 GbE ethernet

·         And another irrelevants specs…

 

In my humble opinion, for this application there is no difference in using the Raspberry Pi or Banana Pi, because the biggest difference is the GPU (and a seamless difference in CPU performance). The GPU performance of Raspberry is more powerful than Banana Pi GPU, but this does not matter for this application. I have both of these options, in my house and office, and I didn’t notice significant differences and I use both for torrents, VPN Server, streaming with Plex, FTP Server, Samba server, and other simultaneous applications.

 

Another cool functionality in the SBCs is GPIO pins available in the PCB, you can control the external Hardware devices with these pins and expand the functionalities, the sky’s the limit!

 

You can install the Portainer and GenieACS docker, in our company we have a Dell PowerEdge to test the typical applications, in order to demonstrate the news to our customers, but this equipament is very expensive for small customers. The docker facilitates the GenieACS installation, because you don’t need to create a VM to install Linux softwares and it is very easy to delete these softwares. I didn’t test the installation of Portainer in SBCs, but I don’t see any problem in doing so, there are requirements and prerequisites in the Portainer website and the SBCs processors arquitecture are compatibilites.