Level3 VPLS

Due to emergency circumstances beyond anyone's control, I have ended up the primary engineer on a project to add an additional link to all our data centers. I am completely out of my depth with regards to WAN connections, and my normal escalation paths (my supervisor and his boss) are out of office, country, and contact for the next few weeks. I also do not have account numbers, billing numbers, circuit IDs or any other information that would make it easy to submit a ticket for help from L3.

While I will continue to try to get support from our vendor (Level3) I thought I'd see if the hive mind had suggestions--as we are on a bit of a deadline.

We have purchased "VPLS" service from Level3 (now CenturyLink) for all of our locations. Handoff is 10Gbase-LR. All interfaces show up/up on the router and Tx/Rx optical levels are normal. I've tested at 7 different locations, all with nominal routers, line cards, and transceivers, so I'm confident that this is not a hardware or carrier issue.

It was my understanding that the VPLS service acted as a virtual switch which learned MAC addresses at each handoff and forwarded accordingly. This does not seem to be the case. While we had plans to use P2P subinterfaces at each site, for testing, I simply set up the interfaces with IPs in the same private /24. However, as far as I can tell, no frames pass on the links: pings are unanswered, ARP tables are empty, and IGP neighborships don't form.

Does anyone know if we need further interaction with Level3 to allow traffic, or are we missing a configuration step? I'm essentially flying blind on the tail end of someone else's project, and while the deadline can be pushed due to the circumstances, I would really like to have this working when my boss returns. I have very little information at my disposal other than my supervisor's claim that "it should just work"; I will be trying to get help from L3 this week, but would really appreciate any suggestions any of you have, especially if you have turned up this service in the past.

If it helps, the hardware consists of Cisco ASR1002-Xs with SPA-1x10G-L-V2 cards and XFP-10GLR-OC192SR optics.