when only looking at costs i would say a 1he dualcore box with a software-router (linux, vyatta, *bsd), should be with reasonable speed at around 600€.

but the best in price/performance-ratio is definitely the juniper 2320, great piece of hard- and soft-ware and at around 1500 € in fixed configuration (max 200mbit/s with 2x fe, no module slots) and the better modular 2320 with 4x ge and 3 module slots for around 2200 €.

specs:

J2320 - 600 Mbps Forwarding, 400 Mbps IMIX Forwarding, 175 Mbps 3DES IPSec mit Hardware Encryption

it has junos with everything in it on board, included in this price. memory and flash can be taken from 3rd manufacturers for as low as 50€ for both. and you get next-day business service including all updates for 130 € a year.

Do you mean routers with hardware acceleretion of MPLS?

Cisco 3600 series with IOS 12.x or higher. The 2800's should support it as well...

You should be able to get them off ebay at a very reasonoable price too.

are we talking about eol-devices or only devices which are sold right now and are able to get a service contract for it?

a 36xx mit 128mb ram and a 1xfe-nm-module is around 120 euro. but nobody would actually use it in a mpls-cloud nowadays (at least i hope so )

Not as far as I am aware normis... MPLS is relatively new in general, not allot of info to begin with. AFAIK, Linux is the only 'pure software' based MPLS implementation that I know about.

Why not use some simulators? Dynamips/GNS3 is pretty good, it can simulate just about any IOS (Cisco) so it should be a trivial excersize setting up some test labs. Last I looked at it, it was pretty resource intensive though, but it did do a darn good job.

Normis..

I will have a couple of my people see what they can look up and get you some numbers thtu distrobution and will get you "street" pricing...

Give me till this afternoon...

Craig

i don't think he wants to test or lab something than rather have a slide in his presentation with: cisco mpls-enabled router 6000$, juniper mpls-enabled router 4500 $, mikrotik mpls-enabled router 1000$ so more a comparison of prices, not really of performance.

otherwise he would not ask for the "cheapest", as the next MUM is just around the corner and i don't think he will buy and of course pay them before that

@normis: you asked for prices of cisco and junipers, i got you juniper ones and cisco is around 2500 for the smallest one, which should be a 2800 (like even a 2801). what else are you looking for? these are real street prizes, i think with the right partner status you might get a bit more rebate, but only in a small percentage.
are you looking for prices of the really big irons? when we are talking about 76xx, asr9k or crs-1 i don't think anybody here can give you a quote, and even if it would be waaaaaaay over 20k-30k except the 76xx, which might be at around 10k.
if you are looking for middle-sized boxes the 73xx or the cat65xx is used very often in an mpls-config here in germany, the 73xx is around 10k in a standard-config and is being sold atm, the 65xx is a cheapo and not really recommended and can be bought at around 2-3k here.

I have two reps on it now..

Craig

I have information on a current cisco solution...

I am waiting for my rep to format the data that was provides by our Cisco rep at one of out distributers..

I have some numbers and as soon as I recive the data I will provide part numbers and street cost.

It loooks to be a base device wth an IOS upgrade (arrent they all !!)

Craig

Let's start from known developers:

Cisco
Juniper
Alcatel-Lucent
LG (MSR-40)
3Com (MSR 20-40)
Riverstone
Huawei
H3C
RAD
Dax
CYB (MP8600)

I think less known products should be cheaper.

I think the cheapest Cisco MPLS capable router is ISR 1841 and cost is arround 1000 US $

Normis...

Did you get the message I sent to support...

I asked it be forwarded to you....

I had a Disti do some digging for me...

I will post here if the information is ok with you..

Have a great one..

You can use as small as a cisco 1811 if you want basic mpls functionality.

Another vendor would be a riverstone now sold by alcatel rs3000 you can find some refurbs very reasonably and these routers support mpls as well as vpls. They were some of the first to implement vpls technology.