Rollup: Small City Municipal Broadband

Sat Feb 2 20:53:20 UTC 2013

Jay,

I'm spotty on mailing lists since most of my time is spent building these
kinds of networks.

1)  Talk to more vendors than just Calix, especially if they're quoting
their Ethernet density on the C7.  Also, keep in mind that port density may
or may not be relevant to your situation since space for muni shelves isn't
usually a problem.  Port density is much more important if you're deploying
in existing telco enclosures but muni networks tend (not universally of
course) to reuse existing city infrastructure building to house the nodes
of their network.  Please note that I am not reccomending against Calix,
they're a good solution in many cases, but AE is not a strong point on the
C7.  The E7 and the B series, which is the old Occam product, is much
better than the C7.  For that matter I wouldn't consider doing a new build
on the C7 since that platform's EoL can't be too far in the future.

2)  I have no idea who  told you this, but this is completely and utterly
incorrect in nationwide terms.  If you have a specific layer 3 provder in
mind that tells you they want a GPON hand off then that's fine, but ISPs in
general don't know what GPON is and have no gear to terminate that kind of
connection.

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 3:22 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Scott Helms" <khelms at zcorum.com>
>
> > Why on earth would you do this with PON instead of active Ethernet?
> > What GPON vendor have you found where their technical staff will tell you
> > this is a good architecture for their PON offering?
>
> Asked and answered, Scott; have you been ignoring the threads all week?
>
> I'm pretty sure I even answered it in the posting, but just in case:
>
> 1) Line cards for the OLT frames appear to be 2 orders of magnitude denser
> for GPON termination than AE (480 ports per 10U vs 10k ports per 10U in
> Calix, unless I've badly misunderstood my sources), and
>
> 2) GPON is what potential L3 providers large enough to want an optical
> handoff are generally used to.
>
> If someone wants AE, they can certainly have it.
>
> (C'mon; miss the *next* turn, too :-)
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra
> --
> Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink
> jra at baylink.com
> Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC
> 2100
> Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land
> Rover DII
> St Petersburg FL USA               #natog                      +1 727 647
> 1274
>
>

-- 
Scott Helms
Vice President of Technology
ZCorum
(678) 507-5000
--------------------------------
http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
--------------------------------