KCAT Success Story - Scaling Regional Connectivity with VyOS

““VyOS has been a strong partner, and we would recommend it to other ISPs, especially those managing growth at our scale.””

— Joel Dabao, President, KCAT Inc.,

Customer Overview

KCAT Inc. is a regional fiber ISP serving Negros Island with FTTH broadband and IPTV. As KCAT scales from 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers, the team is redesigning its network end-to-end: GPON expansion, migration to IPoE, a new BNG design, and a unified NOC visibility system. VyOS powers KCAT’s CGNAT layer today and supports the transition to a full IPoE BNG.

Challenge

As subscriber growth accelerated, KCAT’s CCR-based CGNAT platform began to constrain peak-hour performance. Throughput ceilings, elevated conntrack pressure, and latency spikes made evening periods harder to manage. KCAT needed a solution that delivered:

Optimization: Stable high throughput during peak load
Automation: Leveraging API and Ansible
Integration: Validating NAT rules and NOC visibility

Why VyOS

KCAT evaluated commercial CGNAT boxes, MikroTik scale-out clusters, and Linux-native NAT. VyOS stood out by combining carrier-grade performance with open standards and deployment flexibility on commodity hardware. Key drivers included:

Optimization: Tuning system interrupts, hugepages, and NIC RSS
Automation: Leveraging API and Ansible
Integration: Validating NAT rules and NOC visibility

Implementation

The transition to VyOS was executed in phases, prioritizing stability and performance tuning. The engineering team leaned heavily on internal lab testing to validate configurations before production. The deployment focused on:

Optimization: Tuning system interrupts, hugepages, and NIC RSS
Automation: Leveraging API and Ansible
Integration: Validating NAT rules and NOC visibility

After the initial discovery phase, KCAT achieved a stable, high-performance setup that integrated cleanly with their converged core.

Results

By replacing their legacy hardware platform with VyOS, KCAT improved peak-hour stability and customer experience immediately. Key metrics included:

Optimization: Tuning system interrupts, hugepages, and NIC RSS
Automation: Leveraging API and Ansible
Integration: Validating NAT rules and NOC visibility

Operational and Cost Impact

VyOS lowered hardware cost per Gbps and reduced operational overhead by enabling predictable scale-out on standard servers and commodity NICs. Day-to-day wins included: