Muni fiber: L1 or L2?

Wed Jan 30 06:04:59 UTC 2013

On Jan 29, 2013, at 20:16 , Leo Bicknell <bicknell at ufp.org> wrote:

> In a message written on Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 07:53:34PM -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
>> It really isn't. You'd be surprised how many uncompensated truck rolls
>> are eliminated every day by being able to talk to the ONT from the
>> help desk and tell the subscriber "Well, I can manage your ONT and
>> it's pretty clear the problem is inside your house. Would you like to
>> pay us $150/hour to come out and troubleshoot it for you?"
> 
> I would love statistics from actual providers today.
> 
> I don't know of any residential telco services (pots, ISDN BRI, or
> DSL) that has an active handoff they can test to without a truck
> roll.
> 

Well, often they will (over the phone) tell the customer to take their
phone (or DSL modem) out to the NIU and see if it works there with
the rest of the house "unplugged". So that covers POTS and DSL.

I suppose it would probably also work for BRI if they took the NT out
to the same point.

> I don't know of any cable services with an active handoff similar
> to an ONT, although they can interrogate most cable boxes and modems
> for signal quality measurements remotely to get some idea of what
> is going on.  On the flip side, when CableCo's provide POTS they
> must include a modem with a battery, and thus incur the cost of
> shipping new batteries out and old batteries back every ~5 years;
> which they sometimes do by truck roll...

In the cable world, they can interrogate not only your various boxes
if available, but they can also probe your neighbor's boxes. Because
of the tree-structured nature, if your connection is unresponsive, but
your neighbors all respond, they can be pretty much narrow it down
to your drop and/or your IW. However, in most cases, $CABLECO
takes greater responsibility for the co-ax IW than $TELCO, so this may
be somewhat moot.

> So it seems to me both of those services find things work just fine
> without an ONT-like test point.  ONTs seem unique to FTTH deployments,
> of which most today are GPON...

Not so much...

First, as pointed out above, there is the (less useful, but somewhat
equivalent NIU) for the UTP world.

Cable is a somewhat different business model.

Also, historically, while not residential (in most cases), don't forget
about the various active components on T1 and DS0 circuits which
could be remotely looped by the Telco.

Yes, ONTs are unique to FTTH, but, they do represent one of the
factors that makes FTTH cheaper and more sustainable that copper
plants.

Owen