Enterprise GPON / Zhone Questions

Wed Dec 12 22:16:16 UTC 2018

I'd say that any carrier grade GPON gear is way overkill for a LAN and
you're going to have to run single mode fiber to use the consumer grade
ONTs which is a big extra expense as few structured wiring companies do
single mode.  Second, Dasan Zhone is one of the vendors I'd absolutely
avoid and I've worked on numerous GPON OLTs (Adtran TA5000/3000, Calix C7,
E7, E3, and others).  Their configuration is problematic as you've found
out and they have a poor track record in security.

https://www.securityweek.com/over-million-dasan-routers-vulnerable-remote-hacking

Using third party optics is (with all the GPON vendors) a complete crap
shoot.  Sometimes they will work and suddenly a firmware update from the
OLT vendor comes along and they no longer work.  Other times they don't
work at all or are very unreliable.

GPON is a standard, but in North America the vendors have largely not been
forced to do interoperability and it's very lacking.  Compare that to
Europe where the Fritzbox is one of the most popular ONTs.

Finally, as many have said I cannot see any scenario where building GPON
will be as cost effective, reliable, or performant as simply building out a
switched Ethernet network over fiber.

On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 10:53 AM 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.
>
> -Is anyone familiar with Zhone CLI? The apparent lack of any "show"
> configuration commands is infuriating.
>
>
> 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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