Case Study: Westman Communications Group achieves dramatically faster BGP convergence with Brocade MLXe Core Routers

Everything They Wanted, More Than They Expected

Westman Communications Group, a customer-owned cooperative serving cable TV, Internet, and phone customers across western Manitoba, faced rapidly growing bandwidth demands that strained its legacy routing and switching gear. Their Cisco 7600-based core struggled with slow, CPU-intensive BGP convergence, and the team needed intelligent edge routing, IPv6 dual-stack support, and MPLS capabilities without the cost or complexity of some vendor alternatives.

After a proof-of-concept, Westman deployed Brocade MLXe Core Routers in Toronto, Chicago, and Brandon—replacing Toronto switches and adding a Chicago data center—to enable distributed Layer 2/3 routing, MPLS/VPLS, Multi-Chassis Trunking, and dual IPv4/IPv6 stacking. The new design simplified BGP architecture, delivered an order-of-magnitude improvement in convergence, eliminated Spanning Tree pitfalls, streamlined IPv4/IPv6 management with a single peer group, improved scalability and resiliency, and reduced capital and operational costs.

Westman Communications Group

Graham Johnston

Network Planner