Enterprise GPON / Zhone Questions

Wed Dec 12 21:47:31 UTC 2018

Lower power consumption of electronics and the fact that most (not all) deployments don't need more than 10 megs committed to them, so share a big pipe and burst away. 1U can have 256 endpoints easily and consume less power than a regular switch. 

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Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 

Midwest Internet Exchange 

The Brothers WISP 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Alfie Pates" <alfie at fdx.services> 
To: nanog at nanog.org 
Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2018 3:34:29 PM 
Subject: Re: Enterprise GPON / Zhone Questions 

The discussion was regarding an in-building LAN - residential access networks/WANs are a wholly different beast and GPON is fantastically suitable for that particular problem. 

There is, however, a reason that a lot of new mixed-use (business && residential) WAN fibre deployments end up building a home-run dark fibre network for business use and overbuilding with GPON for residential use - the 1-1 mapping of end users to patch points/flexibility points makes for a vastly more future-proof network. 

I think we often underestimate just how long the networks we install stick around. I ordered a 10Gbit/s service not too long ago over the very same fibre that was used to serve 2Mbit/s connections in the mid 90s: I'm not kidding, the fibre was physically disconnected from an old, derelict 2Mbit/s SDH network termination and plugged into a brand new 10Gbit/s EDD. 

GPON is cool, definitely - I've worked on very large scale GPON deployments before, and it is definitely a very useful technology that allows us to affordably deploy high-bandwidth consumer and small-business connectivity. 

However - it is a compromise, and I don't think you're gaining anything by running GPON versus the tried-and-tested method of active, switch-based aggregation, especially compared to the sacrifices you make deploying a passively-aggregated network. 

As I said before - I wouldn't stake my reputation on it. 

~A 

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