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

BTW: in the EU there is movement towards mandating ISPs allow BYOD, including fibre ONTs.

https://fsfe.org/activities/routers/

I think it's vital that you can run your own modem but I'm not convinced that it's a good idea to force a custom ONT. An ONT is about as dumb as it gets and it's entirely transparent on the stack.

The benefit with an ONT (or even DOCSIS dumb modem) managed by the ISP is that they can do fleet upgrades much quicker as they don't have to keep all old protocols running. For instance the GPON -> XGSPON upgrade that some ISPs are running right now (or DOCSIS 3 upgrade) really only works well if you can turn off the old protocol which requires swapping out all ONTs/DOCSIS modems.

If customers bring their own stuff then you're stuck with these things for much longer.

> If customers bring their own stuff then you're stuck

Why? There is nothing preventing an ISP from saying that from date X, only protocols A, B and C are supported. If you want to use your own device, make sure it supports these protocols.

In other words, the requirement to allow customers to use their own devices does not mean that they can choose all available protocols. The allowed protocols can still be controlled by the ISPs.

Hahahaha! Have you ever done any customer support!? This is not how it works.