Hack GPON – how to access, change and edit fibre ONTs

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>

I'm no fan of PONs myself[1], but realistically they do still represent more than order of magnitude improvement over copper (or wireless shudder), while also proven to be very economical to deploy. Lets remember that perfect is the enemy of good, I'd much rather have PON with 90% household coverage than active fiber with 10% coverage.

Practically also with 50G PON already being standardized and 200G in the horizon it will take decades before the limitations will be relevant; with typical 1:32 split you get comfortably 1G service to subscribers. I do expect gigabit connectivity to be generously good for 99% of users for long time.

It is also noteworthy that while PON was originally standardized as asymmetric, it seems like ISPs have had a change of heart and are widely deploying symmetric PON (i.e. XGS-PON). I don't know what is driving that change (Twitch streamers and Youtubers? :D) but I'm happy about that.

You blame ITU for PON, but IEEE has been pushing EPON (ethernet-PON) for almost as long (GPON ratified 2003, EPON in 2004). Ultimately standards organizations are driven by industry, not the other way around. With the industry having some very big players in it, I have no doubt that PONs would have happened regardless of their standardization status.

While PON is shared medium which is conceptually yucky, in consumer world its impact is less because lines are massively oversubscribed anyways. It doesn't make much difference if you have PON or active fiber if the bottleneck is the uplink.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41634415