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250 points pabs3 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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theideaofcoffee ◴[] No.41643923[source]
GPON is one of those technologies that should have been drowned in the bath before the spec even made it out of its ITU committee. It's just yet another patch papering over how cheap the ISPs were and how they continue to be. Yes, let's add another layer on top of all of the other layers. Now however many millions of links out to subscribers are hamstrung with that decision to split the physical layer up and throw in nonsensical TDM into the mix as well. Good luck squeezing much out beyond 25g in the future, you're just gonna have to rip all of that fiber up anyway and do home runs. Might as well have done it up front with all of the billions that have been given away to the littly piggy piggy ISPs.

I made a comment a few days ago about how I despair when I see anything modern datacenter related. I get the same sort of revulsion when I look at the list of all of the gpon hardware on that page and thing: how much duplicated and wasted effort has gone in to making dozens of different models of the exact same thing. A thing that's not really even needed if a halfway-competent ISP made an investment that's more than the absolute minimum required.

Nice directory democratizing some good reverse engineering, though!

</end soapbox>

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greyface- ◴[] No.41643948[source]
I don't like PON either, and I applaud your soapboxing about it, but IMO this overstates the extent of the impending 'rip it all out and replace it'. They can keep most if not all of the fiber runs, and just switch the PON muxes out for DWDM muxes when they need a home run link to each customer.
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1. theideaofcoffee ◴[] No.41643986[source]
Yep, you could hack in some DWDM and scale with the capabilities of those endpoints, but at the end of the day it's still running over a shared medium. I don't think it's all impending doom and gloom, just a design decision that I think will not age well. It will be done eventually though I think.
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2. the_mitsuhiko ◴[] No.41644699[source]
> but at the end of the day it's still running over a shared medium

Everything is eventually a shared medium. You don't have your own fiber all the way to Facebook. So the question is just at which point do you share and that should be a decision made on throughput and cost.

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3. jandrese ◴[] No.41650017[source]
Yeah, as long as your ISP link isn't the bottleneck then it doesn't really matter if they are not as fast as they could be. I'm running on the cheapest FIOS plan and I can count on one hand the number of services where it is the bottleneck. In fact I can only thing of one at the moment: Steam, and even then only sometimes. Even then the difference is downloading a game in 12 minutes instead of 10 minutes assuming it isn't release week on a big game and the servers are slow.