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

(hack-gpon.org)
250 points pabs3 | 1 comments | 25 Sep 24 00:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.251s | source
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theideaofcoffee ◴[25 Sep 24 05:18 UTC] 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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the_mitsuhiko ◴[25 Sep 24 05:21 UTC] No.41643935[source]▶
I didn’t really understand the criticism. PON is just fine. I have an XGPON ONT and previously there was a GPON ONT. Upgrading was just getting one from the ISP after they upgraded the splitter. GPON and XGSPON can live simultaneously.

I don’t think we will ever hit the limits of PON quite frankly and swapping out PONs for newer and better standards is rather trivial.

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theideaofcoffee ◴[25 Sep 24 05:27 UTC] No.41643955[source]▶
It's equivalent to an old POTS party line, just with some makeup covering its shambling corpse (read: ITU G-number) and a bit more razzle-dazzle after strapping on some lasers. We can do better!
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1. the_mitsuhiko ◴[25 Sep 24 07:30 UTC] No.41644658[source]▶
> It's equivalent to an old POTS party line

I strongly disagree. On a party line information flows along the copper cable to every connected endpoint bidirectionally. While it's true that incoming information flows to all subscribers, never does information that flows out and you only get scrambled data even on the incoming stream. So if you're trying to make a security argument: the system is also safe on a physical level.

> We can do better!

Depends on what "better" is. I was quite critical of PON in the past but I have come around. Practically at this point I think PON is a better way to run networks in most places. At one point you hit a bottleneck anyways and not having to run individual fibers makes for a more resilient and cheaper system.