Re: Last Mile Design

[Ben Cannon <ben () 6by7 net>]

PON in my view is well suited for residential distribution and use profiles.  10G/XG-PON at 10gig/2.5gig is a pretty 
serious residential connection and even 2.5/1 is pretty great for residential 1/1 symmetric service.

That said, I would in urban environments not recommend designing for GPON physical cable plan - go AE on your cabling.  
Play with PON if you want more headaches here with little redeeming features IMO.   Instead, design rings/meshes, and 
think redundant/diverse path and entry/distro.  There’s a reason telco standards work.     These days there’s little 
reason to separate residential vs commercial traffic, it’s all packets at our scale.  Our core is agnostic and switches 
anything we throw it at hardware speed, and it’s HA (min 2 core routers in every POP - even some customer buildings 
have diverse/redundant fiber entry from us now, back to multiple $alldayallnightjob POPs no less, in some cases to meet 
regulatory minimum standards compliance.  All of our DCs are built this way.    Fact is, if you want a network to be 
fast as hell, and never ever go down, think redundant everything with diversity.  

That said, for rural distribution, especially cheap aerial residential services in far flung locations - there’s 
literally nothing finer and faster and more cost effective than GPON - which is HUGELY important for reaching the final 
15 MILLION Americans that do not have broadband internet connections at all.

For those people, GPON can be nothing short of utterly life transforming.

-Ben Cannon
CEO 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC 
ben () 6by7 net <mailto:ben () 6by7 net>




> On Feb 8, 2019, at 10:22 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike () swm pp se> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 8 Feb 2019, Chris Gross wrote:
>
> > For a lot of us, PONs are a way of life and may not even have any 100G capable devices in our network, muchless 
> > enough to make our money on. While you may be so "lucky" to "never really take it seriously", it is supporting 
> > hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of homes in the US.
> >
> > PON is the lifeblood if many rural communities. I'm luckily to have a healthy mix of PON and AE operations since I'm 
> > located next to cities. But I've met cooperatives in the middle of no where with super low density where it's 6 
> > people + 2 donkeys on staff. AE would never work there, but PONs allow them cheap and available broadband options.
> >
> > Unless someone wants to give enough funding to run AE to people's homes, PONs will continue to allow many 
> > communities to have more than cellular internet access options, if that.
>
> PON and AE both have their strengths and weakness and make sense for different deployment scenarios. My biggest 
> problem with PON is that it seems some operators build their fiber plant for PON for all deployment cases and then 
> it's extremely hard to back out of it and switch to AE. If you have AE you can switch to PON fairly easily, but not 
> the other way around if you've put splitters in the manholes.
>
> -- 
> Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike () swm pp se