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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: 0s | source
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pabs3 ◴[25 Sep 24 03:48 UTC] No.41643508[source]▶
BTW: in the EU there is movement towards mandating ISPs allow BYOD, including fibre ONTs.

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

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the_mitsuhiko ◴[25 Sep 24 07:32 UTC] No.41644682[source]▶
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.

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1. bcrl ◴[26 Sep 24 15:13 UTC] No.41659323[source]▶
You can actually run GPON and XGSPON simultaneously over the same PON segment as they use different wavelengths of light, so there is no reason to rip out all the GPON nodes at the same time. This allows deferring the truck roll and ONT costs until the customer upgrades to higher speeds.

With DOCSIS there is much more pressure to upgrade all CPE as any given chunk of RF spectrum can only run one version of DOCSIS. One 6MHz channel of RF spectrum on coax has a puny amount of bandwidth compared to a single lambda on fibre.