The discussion was regarding an in-building LAN - residential access networks/WANs are a wholly different beast and GPON is fantastically suitable for that particular problem.

There is, however, a reason that a lot of new mixed-use (business && residential) WAN fibre deployments end up building a home-run dark fibre network for business use and overbuilding with GPON for residential use - the 1-1 mapping of end users to patch points/flexibility points makes for a vastly more future-proof network.

I think we often underestimate just how long the networks we install stick around. I ordered a 10Gbit/s service not too long ago over the very same fibre that was used to serve 2Mbit/s connections in the mid 90s: I'm not kidding, the fibre was physically disconnected from an old, derelict 2Mbit/s SDH network termination and plugged into a brand new 10Gbit/s EDD.

GPON is cool, definitely - I've worked on very large scale GPON deployments before, and it is definitely a very useful technology that allows us to affordably deploy high-bandwidth consumer and small-business connectivity.

However - it is a compromise, and I don't think you're gaining anything by running GPON versus the tried-and-tested method of active, switch-based aggregation, especially compared to the sacrifices you make deploying a passively-aggregated network.

As I said before - I wouldn't stake my reputation on it.

~A