Pharos RADIUS Server System Architecture

About Pharos RADIUS Server

Carrier-grade network access control

Pharos RADIUS Server (PRS) is a high-performance, standards-based, carrier-grade Authentication, Authorisation, and Accounting (AAA) RADIUS Server that lets you provide secure internet access control to your customers.

PRS is built specifically to provide secure customer access control to MNO and ISP wireless and wired broadband networks.

PRS’ core AAA functionality lets you:

  • Authenticate customers (users) or devices before allowing them access to your network, and in so doing, protect your network against unauthorised access.
  • Authorise authenticated users and devices to use specific network data services based on policies—provided by your Customer Relationship Management system and enforced by your Network Access Server—to control users’ service levels (such as their subscriptions, product catalogues, bandwidth limits, and usage caps).
  • Account for the use of consumed services and use this data for billing and obtaining network-usage statistics.

PRS makes it easy for you to manage RADIUS using its secure HTTPS web UI and OpenAPI functionality. These tools let you set up and update your customers' profiles, specify RADIUS data, check who's online, and monitor network traffic.


Key Benefits


  • Carrier-Grade Availability: Delivers 99.999% uptime for always-available AAA services in critical telecom and ISP network environments.
  • High Performance, Low Latency: Delivers rapid authentication, authorisation, and accounting responses—even at scale—ensuring fast network access for users..

Key Features


  • Core AAA Services: Delivers secure user authentication, access control, and session accounting for mobile and broadband networks.
  • High Performance: PRS processes massive volumes of RADIUS AAA transactions per second for millions of concurrent internet-using users.
  • IP Pool Management, RADIUS Proxy, RADIUS Extensions, Framed Routes, plus Standards-Based: See adjacent descriptions in Why Pharos RADIUS Server?
  • User Interfaces: Our Web application lets you define and manage your allowed network (RADIUS-using) customers, configure AAA services to your specifications, and monitor active RADIUS user sessions. In addition, PRS supports OpenAPI to enable easy integration with external systems.
  • Billing and Statistics: PRS generates RADIUS Event Data Records that you can use to bill customers for using network services and obtain RADIUS statistics that reveal customers' network behaviours.
  • Audit and Log Records: Tracks user activity in detail, resource usage, while also enabling server health monitoring, issue diagnosis, regulatory compliance, and reporting.
  • Carrier-Grade Redundancy and Availability: Dual redundant active-active servers provide 99.999% carrier-grade availability. This ensures that your networks will be always-available for your customers to access to use the internet.
  • Scalability: PRS grows seamlessly from a single server managing thousands of users to multi-server clusters handling millions, with load balancing for peak performance—ensuring fast, efficient, and future-proof AAA network access control.
  • Deployment Options: Deploy system software on cloud-based virtualised servers and or on-premises bare metal servers.

Why Pharos RADIUS Server?


MNOs and ISPs choose us for our unique RADIUS features, which go beyond what open-source RADIUS solutions offer. These include:

  • High Performance and Low Latency: MNOs and ISPs serve millions of customers. Unlike open-source RADIUS. PRS is built for high speed and low delay to handle millions of customers at once with huge real-time performance. Open-source RADIUS can’t compete with this.
  • IP Pool Management: Dynamically assigns and reclaims IPs from configurable pools for efficient use and seamless connectivity for millions of subscribers. It provides static IPs for fixed-address needs and restricted IPs for secure corporate access. This is a Pharos feature.
  • RADIUS Proxy Functionality: Ensure secure and efficient authentication across distributed networks by forwarding requests to the correct RADIUS servers.
  • Extended RADIUS Functionality: Gain customisation and integration with additional authentication methods, vendor-specific attributes, and advanced policies, improving adaptability for diverse network environments. This is a Pharos feature.
  • Carrier-Grade Availability: PRS provides 99.999% high availability with redundancy and failover mechanisms and—all critical for telecom and ISP networks. Open-source RADIUS lacks these carrier-grade features unless heavily customised.
  • Framed Routes: Automatically assign predefined routes to authenticated users, enabling granular access control without manual client configuration.
  • Standards-Based: MNOs and ISPs need to comply with RFCs. Our standards-based RADIUS server integrates seamlessly into any network environment.

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