Residential GPON last mile for network engineers (Telus AS852 and others)

Wed Oct 14 02:34:16 UTC 2020

On 2020-10-13 6:38 p.m., Eric Kuhnke wrote:
>
> Any insights as to what the configuration of the Telus AS852 GPON 
> network looks would be helpful. Or other observations in general on 
> technically-oriented persons who are doing similar with other ILECs.
>
I have heard rumors that Telus's GPON deployment is a little bit 
different depending on when the location was connected to GPON, although 
I think they've been working towards having a single unified 
provisioning system. I'm unclear if there are user-impacting 
differences, I haven't noticed any.

I deal with several sites that are connected to Telus's consumer GPON 
network. Here are three samples:

1. Telus GPON is terminated to a Telus-provided media converter that 
provides a copper gigabit ethernet switch. The Telus-supported 
deployment involves some magic wifi gateway that speaks both DSL and 
Ethernet for WAN connectivity. Removing the magic box and using standard 
DHCP from my own networking equipment works fine. This site was amongst 
Telus's very first GPON deployments.

2. Telus GPON is terminated to a magic GPON SFP. The Telus-supported 
deployment involves an SFP being provided to CPE they deploy which has 
an SFP port (in addition to the DSL & Ethernet WAN uplink ports which 
are also present on that CPE). That SFP instead goes into my own 
equipment, and standard DHCP works fine. I specifically requested an 
SFP-based deployment when I ordered the service, and again from the 
technician that did the install. While the tech was confused why I would 
care, he was happy to oblige.

3. For a site that was deployed after I was familiar with how it went, I 
had my equipment at that site pre-configured to do DHCP on my SFP port 
prior to the technician arriving. The technician was quite happy to dash 
off to his next appointment when after plugging in the SFP I was able to 
confirm that everything was working. At that site I don't have any 
Telus-owned CPE other than their SFP, the technician had reason to 
provide any.

I have heard rumours that if you want their "Optik TV" service that it 
simply requires standard-but-undocumented VLAN tagging, but I've never 
had reason to care to find out.

Telus happily provides >1 IPv4 over DHCP to multiple devices on the 
interface, and their equipment also happily allocates a /56 in IPv6 
land. While there's lot to be unhappy about with Telus, they do a very 
good job with some of the important basics.

Regards,

Daniel Dent

https://www.danieldent.com/