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>

Fiber investment in The Netherlands from the big telcos is now fully based on XGS-PON. Many homes that already had fiber installed do have the technically superior AON (a dedicated fiber to the home), but it seems like investment in this infrastructure has stopped.

The current situation is one where XGS-PON users can get 5Gbps subscriptions, whereas AON users are stuck at 1Gbps - seemingly because the telcos aren’t upgrading their point-of-presence hardware to support anything beyond 1Gbps.

> whereas AON users are stuck at 1Gbps - seemingly because the telcos aren’t upgrading

poor souls, though can we care about the low-end first?

The low end doesn't have to deal with AON vs GPON. They get DSL or DOCSIS, or if they're unlucky dial-up.

And when the poor souls on slow internet do get upgraded, AON vs GPON suddenly decides if they can get upgraded to the new higher speeds in the next ten years or not. 1gbps may be relatively slow in 10 years, but with a widely spread GPON you're not getting much more out of that, while with AON entire neighbourhoods can be upgraded by replacing a single rack in the local POP.