A few GPON questions...

Tue Dec 11 17:03:03 UTC 2018

Hello

We run a small FTTH internet service provider using Zhone MXK198 switches.
This is an older discontinued platform and since Zhone and Dasan merged,
there might be nothing but the name in common with your equipment. Anyway,
ours are stable and in five years on about 15 switches, we only have had
one crash. Fixed after a power cycle.

This is however the kind of equipment that you only run tested and verified
setup on. Lots of stuff does not work quite as it should, but when you find
a good configuration and stay with that, it is good. There are some strange
things, like vlan 7 being reserved and unusable.

When used with fs.com GPON sfp modules, it will work if the port has had a
genuine Zhone sfp installed previously. However after a reboot it will
reject the module. You then need to shift your genuine module through all
the ports to activate them.

The switch will reject other brands of ONU/ONT. Contrary to what they tell
you, this is not because of lacking standards. There is a secret setting
(which I don't have) that will make it accept third party ONU. Likewise if
the ONU is programmed with the Zhone vendor code, it will be accepted.

We are currently looking at cheaper options that do not come with vendor
locks for SFP and ONU.

Regards

Baldur

tir. 11. dec. 2018 16.45 skrev Nick Bogle <nick at bogle.se>:

> Hello fellow NANOG members :)
>
> Let me start with a little bit of background, my day job is a Network
> Engineer for a local university where we have primarily a Cisco environment
> from phones to switching to routing, etc. Before my time, we hired a
> contractor to design a GPON LAN system for a new building as a cost saving
> measure (though I am not sure how successful that was).
>
> Either way, the contractor is about to hand the system off to us, and we
> have gone through the training and such, and I feel confident in my ability
> to manage the system, but we have a few questions that the manufacturer of
> our equipment and our contractor didn't really want to answer. We are
> currently using a Dasan Zhone MXK-F1419 with several different downstream
> ONT models (all Zhone).
>
> -We would like to consider use of 3rd party GPON B+ Optics on the
> linecards to add redundancy to the splitter (as the cost of 1st party are
> too high). Does anyone have experience with 3rd party
> vendors/compatibility/stability issues? We were told they theoretically
> should work and just throw a log event, but it hasn't been tested. If so,
> what vendors would you recommend? So far all we've really seen are Ubiquiti
> and Fiberstore optics.
>
> -As GPON is a standard itself, I'm aware interoperability between OLT and
> ONT vendors is heavily limited.. Does anyone have any experience using say,
> Zhone ONT's with a different model OLT, or Zhone ONT's with a different
> model OLT? I've heard word that Zhone ONT's may be able to work with Nokia
> OLT's but it's technically not supported.
>
> -We've already experienced some pretty big stability issues (have replaced
> 1 line card 5 times..), our contractor is saying it's just because we were
> a pretty early adopter of this line and that they've fixed it and fixed
> internal policies to add additional QA and testing before shipping to
> customers. Does anyone have any experience with working with Zhone and
> their overall stability of components?
>
> - Any other thoughts/gotchas/advice for deploying a GPON environment in a
> corporate LAN? (or about deploying a Zhone solution) It's pretty service
> provider oriented, and is incredible noticeable in the CLI.
>
> Feel free to contact me offlist if you have any pertinent info that you
> don't want on the list.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Nick Bogle
> nick at bogle.se
>
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