A few GPON questions...

Wed Dec 12 09:44:07 UTC 2018

I have tested a variety of equipment as part of my FTTH enterprise. Active Ethernet is where I’m still sitting because I’m not quite happy with some of the PON hardware out there personally. 

Yes active solutions provide more flexibility in one area but they are only viable in dense environments where the cost to build is already high and the fiber count is cheap comparably. 

If you are within the b+ optics link budget there are options, but if you are spliced at your splitters any migration may be tricky. 

I’ve been doing 2F drop to the home so I can later to technology migration as the cost variance is about 7c for 1F vs 10c/ft for 2F. It’s a bit more as those drops are the longer portion vs the backbone legs, but I can change from active to GPON or back without trouble. 

It sounds like you have a typical vendor management problem where the equipment isn’t meeting your needs. Find a way to migrate to something else. Hopefully you have spare plant and budget to move to something else. If it’s homes, hopefully you can do a migration without coordination and entering the home, if it’s office campus see if you can DWDM or CWDM to get the capacity you need or there are other hardware like the UBNT OLT out there. A lot of the smaller FTTH types are also using the Huwaei hardware. Qualifying a vendor is hard and they change. I’ve spent decades working with my vendors trying to encourage them to do the right thing. The story you tell is a typical one of overworked employees without the power to fix the problems they see. 

As others said I would consider a change as your business risk may be too high. This is where network operation becomes business risk mitigation. 

- Jared 

Sent from my iCar

> On Dec 6, 2018, at 10:18 PM, Nick Bogle <nick at bogle.se> wrote:
> 
> 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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