←back to thread

250 points pabs3 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.245s | source
Show context
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>

replies(6): >>41643935 #>>41643948 #>>41644209 #>>41644537 #>>41644633 #>>41645811 #
1. hacst ◴[] No.41645811[source]
Some providers do what imo is a best of both worlds approach here: Every customer has a full fiber run to the PoP, but there they use GPON to save on the active components. The actual fiber is pretty cheap compared to actually bringing it into the ground and that way you retain full flexibility.