4 ms·

Ugh, I see PON, my eyes roll. I know it's all the rage for fiber providers since it's cheap, but it's a cop-out and a cheap-out. All new fiber deploys should ha

Ugh, I see PON, my eyes roll. I know it's all the rage for fiber providers since it's cheap, but it's a cop-out and a cheap-out. All new fiber deploys should have home runs. Fiber is so incrediblyt cheap it's stupid not to do so. Otherwise you'll just be stuck with the idiocy of having to manage the worst of both cable in sharing bandwidth in some situations and WDM in having to manage x8 or x16 or even x32 splits and associated power budgets. It's just a lose-lose, even if it's 25G!!!111. Build it right or don't do it at all.

RationPhantoms 3y ago
This is a hilariously bad take. PON works well for residential and SMB last-mile connectivity. Especially compared to the shitshow that is coaxial troubleshooting.
- ksec 3y ago
  >This is a hilariously bad take. I am starting to think if I should completely give up Hardware topics on HN. 4G/5G ( 3GPP Rel ), WiFi ( 802.11 ), USB, Thunderbolt, CPU, GPU, FPGA, DSP, Foundry, PON, DOCSIS, DRAM / NAND, Display...... It is getting ridiculous the amount of noise Vs signal in these topic. The only good thing left is at least we still have enough people coming out to correct all the Anti-GPON misinformation.
eppp 3y ago
If GPON or XGS ends up being a mistake, it can be fixed pretty easily as long as they didn't do distributed splits. As it stands currently, GPON itself is very much overkill in our deployment.
throw0101c 3y ago
> Build it right or don't do it at all. Or build what you can afford/finance now, and expand later. There's no technical reason why active fibre can't first be deployed to the node or curb or top of the street first, with PON going down the rest of block/street to begin with. This allows for must of the gains over co-ax and especially DSL. If Internet use cases ever reach the point where an entire street or floor of an apartment/condo is contending for the full bandwidth of a 25Gb PON fibre run, they can then perhaps split from (say) 1:32 to 1:16, 1:8, etc until each customer gets an individual run. There's only a finite amount of capital, and spending for individual runs for early deployments may delay other people. IMHO it will be a number of years before people can regularly saturate >1Gbps, and much longer before 10Gb use-cases start appearing. As it stands HS-PON (ITU G.9804) can do 50/50, 50/25, or 50/12.5: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Speed_PON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Speed_PON 50Gb split by 32, is 1.5625 per customer before contention starts. Are there particular use-cases where a sustained 1.5Gbps (up and/or down) is not sufficient in 2023? Of course it may be possible to burst higher if the rest of the fibre isn't busy. I currently have 1Gb, and software updates certainly come down faster than my previous 25Mb VDSL, and 4K YT videos don't buffer as much. Though I'm not sure if things would be materially different than if I had (say) 'only' 500Mbps.
- eppp 3y ago
  I am not sure the people bashing GPON know how a typical network is constructed. If GPON doesnt work out, we dont ahve to rip it all out and do it again. There are home runs back to all of the splitter cabinets. If we need to switch to home run back to the CO, we could do it fairly easily. We just run larger cables to the cabinets and patch directly across instead of patching input to splitter to house.
  - theideaofcoffee 3y ago
    I understand how they are constructed, I've supported them in the past. What I quarrel with is the splitter aspect and the additional equipment that inevitably appears between the subscriber and the final termination point--be that a splitter, be that yet another patch that could fail inside another cabinet along the line in the middle of nowhere. If you're going to make p2p home runs, just do it. Support the equipment in the first place at the CO to make that possible, rather than installing splitters then ripping out those splitters, patching things back up. Remove the intermediate cabinets. At that point you may as well just provide raw ethernet. What was the point of the PON nonsense then? PON is a stop-gap technology that's outlived its usefulness, if it ever was there before. It's a crutch and should be retired.
    - throw0101c 3y ago
      > PON is a stop-gap technology that's outlived its usefulness, if it ever was there before. It's a crutch and should be retired. Considering I just moved from 25Mb VDSL to 1Gb GPON in the last few months I find it very useful: certainly my software updates come down much more quickly (though my SSH CLI sessions for work as a sysadmin aren't really that different). I'm not sure what I'd find more useful about a direct connection over a shared-medium fibre.
    - rbranson 3y ago
      PON is what's allowed fiber deployments out for consumer affordable prices and continued scalability of endpoint bandwidth, so "stop-gap" seems a little bit of an extreme position. There are a lot of environments where just the space and power requirements of a 10G port for each customer make it a non-starter, let alone the cost.

RationPhantoms 3y ago

This is a hilariously bad take. PON works well for residential and SMB last-mile connectivity. Especially compared to the shitshow that is coaxial troubleshooting.

ksec 3y ago
>This is a hilariously bad take. I am starting to think if I should completely give up Hardware topics on HN. 4G/5G ( 3GPP Rel ), WiFi ( 802.11 ), USB, Thunderbolt, CPU, GPU, FPGA, DSP, Foundry, PON, DOCSIS, DRAM / NAND, Display...... It is getting ridiculous the amount of noise Vs signal in these topic. The only good thing left is at least we still have enough people coming out to correct all the Anti-GPON misinformation.

eppp 3y ago

If GPON or XGS ends up being a mistake, it can be fixed pretty easily as long as they didn't do distributed splits. As it stands currently, GPON itself is very much overkill in our deployment.

throw0101c 3y ago

> Build it right or don't do it at all. Or build what you can afford/finance now, and expand later. There's no technical reason why active fibre can't first be deployed to the node or curb or top of the street first, with PON going down the rest of block/street to begin with. This allows for must of the gains over co-ax and especially DSL. If Internet use cases ever reach the point where an entire street or floor of an apartment/condo is contending for the full bandwidth of a 25Gb PON fibre run, they can then perhaps split from (say) 1:32 to 1:16, 1:8, etc until each customer gets an individual run. There's only a finite amount of capital, and spending for individual runs for early deployments may delay other people. IMHO it will be a number of years before people can regularly saturate >1Gbps, and much longer before 10Gb use-cases start appearing. As it stands HS-PON (ITU G.9804) can do 50/50, 50/25, or 50/12.5: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Speed_PON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Speed_PON 50Gb split by 32, is 1.5625 per customer before contention starts. Are there particular use-cases where a sustained 1.5Gbps (up and/or down) is not sufficient in 2023? Of course it may be possible to burst higher if the rest of the fibre isn't busy. I currently have 1Gb, and software updates certainly come down faster than my previous 25Mb VDSL, and 4K YT videos don't buffer as much. Though I'm not sure if things would be materially different than if I had (say) 'only' 500Mbps.

eppp 3y ago
I am not sure the people bashing GPON know how a typical network is constructed. If GPON doesnt work out, we dont ahve to rip it all out and do it again. There are home runs back to all of the splitter cabinets. If we need to switch to home run back to the CO, we could do it fairly easily. We just run larger cables to the cabinets and patch directly across instead of patching input to splitter to house.
- theideaofcoffee 3y ago
  I understand how they are constructed, I've supported them in the past. What I quarrel with is the splitter aspect and the additional equipment that inevitably appears between the subscriber and the final termination point--be that a splitter, be that yet another patch that could fail inside another cabinet along the line in the middle of nowhere. If you're going to make p2p home runs, just do it. Support the equipment in the first place at the CO to make that possible, rather than installing splitters then ripping out those splitters, patching things back up. Remove the intermediate cabinets. At that point you may as well just provide raw ethernet. What was the point of the PON nonsense then? PON is a stop-gap technology that's outlived its usefulness, if it ever was there before. It's a crutch and should be retired.
  - throw0101c 3y ago
    > PON is a stop-gap technology that's outlived its usefulness, if it ever was there before. It's a crutch and should be retired. Considering I just moved from 25Mb VDSL to 1Gb GPON in the last few months I find it very useful: certainly my software updates come down much more quickly (though my SSH CLI sessions for work as a sysadmin aren't really that different). I'm not sure what I'd find more useful about a direct connection over a shared-medium fibre.
  - rbranson 3y ago
    PON is what's allowed fiber deployments out for consumer affordable prices and continued scalability of endpoint bandwidth, so "stop-gap" seems a little bit of an extreme position. There are a lot of environments where just the space and power requirements of a 10G port for each customer make it a non-starter, let alone the cost.