Juniper MX Series vs. Sierra Wireless AirLink Cellular Routers and Gateways

It is well suited as a WAN/Internet Edge device. It is easy to configure BGP, contexts and routing instances. Its suite of tools has saved our organization money by being able to provide services (tag stacking, for example) that our provider would normally charge us more for. Due to interface cost this would not be appropriate as a LAN aggregation device.

Incentivized

If you only need 10 devices, there are other solutions that will fit and may be cheaper. For deployments of hundreds of devices, the management capabilities of the product are well worth the cost. In addition, for sites that run on low power (e.g. solar), the devices are fantastic, with idle power <1W for some devices.

Incentivized

• It's a robust platform, very resilient. It handles large traffic flows well.
• It's a flexible architecture, it can be configured with provider or enterprise options (or both!)
• It has an excellent versioning system, simple commit/confirm/rollback procedures!

Incentivized

• Cellular band coverage
• Managability
• Software updates

Incentivized

• Sometimes I wish that documentation was more robust, complete, though this has been improved of late.
• It would be nice if netflow was easier to configure.
• It would be nice if the platform was cheaper.

Incentivized

• Configuration changes require a reboot

Incentivized

We preferred Juniper over Cisco for our WAN/Internet routing needs for a number of reasons. First was the price, the Juniper offering was much more competitive than Cisco's. Secondly, was feature set, Juniper's implementation of routing protocols, routing tables, and forwarding options are better thought-out than Cisco's (not to mention Juniper's longstanding use of commit/confirm/rollback features, which Cisco has only started to use recently, and only on some of their products).

Incentivized

The manageability and power requirements of the Sierra Wireless modems is great. The cost of alternative solutions may be lower, but the Sierra Wireless solution has saved the company from many issues over the past 10 years.

Incentivized

• Its flexible architecture and configuration styles has saved our organization money by providing feature we would have otherwise needed to purchase from our ISPs.
• It has a long and healthy lifecycle, with potential upgrades for more performance if needed. (This helps alleviate the downtime associated with chassis replacement.)
• The only drawback is some of the highest throughput interfaces are expensive.

Incentivized

• These devices have allowed us to replace copper circuits without the high costs of a satellite solution
• The low operating costs have allowed us to deploy cell to improve resiliency at many sites
• The serial port allows us to replace modem access at sites where copper circuits have become very expensive.

Incentivized