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

Thu Oct 15 20:13:50 UTC 2020

I have a Bell Canada gig fibre connection.  My first attempt was to bridge their all-in-one box (disaster, unreliable as all hell), second was to set a bunch of rules for inbound traffic.  Apart from inbound access being *very* iffy, their device was s_l_o_w.

So I pulled the fibre GBIC, used a small switch to grab the correct VLAN and pointed that at a small Cisco box.  Way more flexible, faster and more reliable than Bell’s box.  DSLreports had all the info needed to get the correct VLANs

YMMV

> On Oct 13, 2020, at 9:56 PM, Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Very interesting. Looks like the intention is to bypass the ONT entirely and use a GPON ONT SFP in ones own choice of small home router. If the ISP wants to do some weird TR069 provisioning or other stuff it could be seen as interfering with the proper management of their network if you remove the CPE entirely.
> 
> In an ideal world, personally I would be totally fine with keeping a telco provided small ONT configured as a dumb L2 bridge, with one optical interface single strand (SC/APC) going to the ISP, and 1000BaseT to my own router.
> 
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 6:51 PM Eric Dugas <edugas at unknowndevice.ca> wrote:
> I don't have any particular insights for Telus, but there is a huge thread about bypassing Bell ONTs on DSLReports: https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r32230041-Internet-Bypassing-the-HH3K-up-to-2-5Gbps-using-a-BCM57810S-NIC
> Cheers,
> Eric
> On Oct 13 2020, at 9:38 pm, Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke at gmail.com> wrote:
> With the growth of gigabit class single fiber GPON last mile services, I imagine a number of people reading the list must have subscribed to such by now.
> 
> Something that I have observed, and shared observations with a number of colleagues, is that very often a person who works for ($someAS) lives in a location where you are effectively singlehomed to ($someotherAS). Maybe you bought your house before you got a job with your current employer, or maybe the network you work for doesn't do residential last mile service at all. Perhaps you work remotely for a regional sized entity that's a long distance away from where you live.
> 
> Therefore necessitating a choice of service from whatever facilities based consumer-facing ISP happens to service your home.
> 
> For example, in Seattle, a number of people discovered that they could keep the Centurylink GPON ONT, and remove the centurylink-provided router/modem combo device. Provided that they were able to configure their own router (small vyatta, pfsense box, mikrotik, whatever) to speak a certain VLAN tag on its WAN interface and be a normal PPPoE / DHCP client.
> 
> I'm sure there are a lot of people who prefer to run their own home router and wifi devices, and not rely upon a ($big_residential_isp) provided all-in-one router/nat/wifi box with opaque configuration parameters, or no ability to change configuration at all.
> 
> 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.