Adtran serves up newest low-cost router

As long as Cisco leads the router market, competitors will continue to come up with differentiators. With Adtran's new NetVanta 4305 access router, the differentiators are price, price, price.

Depending on configuration, the NetVanta 4305 - which Adtran began shipping in late September and will provide upgraded routing software at the end of this month - can cost thousands of dollars less than similarly equipped Cisco models.

As our exclusive Clear Choice tests show, the NetVanta 4305 is a modest performer. The beta routing software still has some rough spots, including scalability issues, but the price advantage might offset these, especially for managers of small or midsize enterprise networks.

The 1U systems we tested were equipped with two fixed-port Fast Ethernet interfaces and an optional module supporting eight T-1 (1.544M bit/sec) serial interfaces. The NetVanta 4305's base price includes support for IPv4 routing protocols and a stateful firewall. IPSec support is optional, as is a DSX-1 module for interconnection with PBXs.

The base NetVanta 4305 costs $2,500, and the system as tested is priced at $5,000. In contrast, a comparable Cisco 3725 base model lists at $8,500.

The NetVanta's command-line interface strongly resembles IOS, but lacks some features of its Cisco counterpart, such as redirecting command output through a pipe.

Testing performance

We measured performance of the NetVanta 4305 in seven ways: static routing; small- and large-table routing information protocol (RIP) routing; small-, medium- and large-table open shortest path first (OSPF) routing (see "How we did it"). We also tested IPSec tunnel capacity (see "Testing IPSec").

The static routing test was a best-case scenario; the goal was to show the maximum rate at which the NetVanta 4305 boxes would forward traffic without dynamic routing enabled. We then repeated the same test using either RIP or OSPF, and routing tables of various sizes. We tested in a back-to-back configuration, linking two routers with up to eight T-1 interfaces, and then repeated the tests on one router with traffic flowing between two Fast Ethernet interfaces.

In the two-router tests, throughput was slightly lower than line rate with medium or large frames, regardless of the presence or absence of dynamic routing (see graphic). Tests with 256-byte frames are the most noteworthy, because that size is close to the average frame length on many enterprise networks.

Click to see: Ethernet throughput results

These tests uncovered two anomalies. First, Adtran's beta software supported only seven T-1s in the multilink PPP link, when dynamic routing was enabled.

Second, throughput with RIP routing didn't scale as high as OSPF, especially when we threw short frames at the NetVanta pair. Short-frame throughput with a 240-route table (the largest we attempted) was noticeably lower than with a smaller 64-route table.

Even with RIP's 15-hop limit, our "maximum" test case represented a relatively small network. Route redistribution and multiple paths easily can swell table size well beyond the maximum levels we used with the NetVanta 4305. With OSPF, throughput for both small and large frames degraded as table size grew.