In it's heyday Starent equipment was excellent, but I don't think it's as good since Cisco bought them. So for MME's, S/P-GW's, etc I would use again. This was

In it's heyday Starent equipment was excellent, but I don't think it's as good since Cisco bought them. So for MME's, S/P-GW's, etc I would use again. This was the standard that I tried to hold the other vendors to on support, upgradeability, configuration, etc. The OAM / support systems were pretty weak, but our team just didn't bother to use them, and the built in tools were better. For DNS, infoblox appliances were good. Infoblox didn't have much experience with the GSMA DNS setup or carrier roaming, so they weren't well positioned to help us, but most the problems we had were with the GSMA specs and our partners being wonky, not Infoblox itself, so we managed to get through those issues on our own. I never used in production, but we had Acme packet SBC's in our lab for awhile, which looked like they'd be great. But that's under Oracle's umbrella now, so probably something to avoid. Our teams also really liked Tekelec for SS7 routing but I never used it myself. I looked at Tekelec's DRA and it looked like it was pretty good and well designed, but again it's Oracle now. I don't have much direct experience with alcatel's stuff in production. I worked with them on a reseller agreement, so the resold equipment doesn't really reflect them, and doing some evals. Alcatel's CSCFs looked competent, but I think our PCRF team was really struggling from what I saw. And yea, telecom is in that state, were it's jointly developed standards, but the implementations are very vendor driven. As an industry, the software all needs to be high performance, high capacity, and it's following millions of pages of standards, and then the add on's that the carriers want to do. I don't think there is much incentive for telecoms to go OSS on the telecom handling, although multiple vendors are starting to build off of OSS cloud native stuff. So it'll be interesting to see providers using kubernetes for example for a control plane and upgrades / capacity expansion. Or whether it's possible to integrate with an open tracing. In my view, OSS for along time was way behind what the telco's were doing from a troubleshooting / high availability / services perspective. But the establishment of the CNCF and all the projects under that umbrella seem to be jumping over what telco's had as proprietary solutions. How those get merged in will be interesting to see.