Why AthenaBNG?

The Problem with Traditional BNGs​

Hardware-based BNG appliances from Juniper, Cisco, and Nokia are designed for Tier 1 carriers. For small-to-medium Australian ISPs, they present serious challenges:

• Cost — $50k–$500k+ per chassis, plus expensive per-subscriber licensing
• Vendor lock-in — Proprietary CLI, protocols, and management plane
• Over-provisioned — Designed for millions of subscribers when you have thousands
• Slow iteration — Feature requests go into a vendor roadmap you don't control
• Supply chain — 12–18 month lead times for hardware in the current market

The AthenaBNG Approach​

AthenaBNG is a software-based BNG that runs on standard Linux servers. It delivers the same subscriber management capabilities at a fraction of the cost.

Built for the Australian Market​

AthenaBNG is designed specifically for Australian ISP requirements:

• NBN compatibility — Tested with NBN HFC, FTTP, FTTN, and Fixed Wireless access technologies
• QinQ VLAN stacking — Handles the multi-layer VLAN architectures common in Australian wholesale access networks
• ACCC compliance — Accounting and session data suitable for regulatory reporting
• Australian support — Built and supported from Brisbane, in your timezone

Technical Advantages​

CAKE QoS​

AthenaBNG uses the CAKE queuing discipline — the gold standard for broadband traffic shaping. CAKE provides:

• Per-flow fairness — No single subscriber stream can starve others
• Accurate overhead compensation — Correctly accounts for PPPoE, QinQ, and Ethernet framing
• Low latency — AQM (Active Queue Management) keeps latency under control
• Diffserv support — Prioritise voice and video traffic automatically

No other BNG offers CAKE-based QoS out of the box.

Rust Core​

The critical path daemons (demux, QoS orchestrator, CLI) are written in Rust:

• Memory safe — No buffer overflows, no use-after-free, no data races
• Fast — Zero-cost abstractions, no garbage collector pauses
• Reliable — The compiler catches entire classes of bugs at compile time
• Async — Tokio-based async runtime handles thousands of concurrent operations

Linux Kernel Networking​

By building on the Linux kernel's networking stack, AthenaBNG benefits from:

• Mature netfilter/nftables — Battle-tested NAT and firewall
• Modern NIC drivers — Full hardware offload support
• XDP/eBPF — Future path to wire-speed packet processing
• iproute2/tc — Decades of engineering in the traffic control subsystem
• Community — The largest networking developer community in the world

Who Is AthenaBNG For?​

• Regional ISPs serving 500–50,000 subscribers
• Wireless ISPs (WISPs) needing subscriber management for fixed wireless
• NBN RSPs who want control over their access network edge
• Managed service providers offering wholesale BNG-as-a-service
• Greenfield ISPs who want to start lean and scale up

Next Steps​

• Explore Features — See the full feature set
• Architecture — Understand how the components fit together
• Get in Touch — Request a demo or discuss your requirements