Killing the ISP Appliance: An eBPF/XDP Approach to Distributed BNG

I used to work for an ISP startup that was building next-generation infrastructure. The company didn’t make it, but the problems we were trying to solve stuck with me. So I spent a few weeks building what we never got to: an open-source, eBPF-accelerated BNG that runs directly on OLT hardware. This post explains the architecture and why I think it’s the future of ISP edge infrastructure. The Problem: Centralised BNG is a Bottleneck Traditional ISP architecture looks like this: