In a message written on Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 07:53:34PM -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
It really isn't. You'd be surprised how many uncompensated truck rolls are eliminated every day by being able to talk to the ONT from the help desk and tell the subscriber "Well, I can manage your ONT and it's pretty clear the problem is inside your house. Would you like to pay us $150/hour to come out and troubleshoot it for you?"
I would love statistics from actual providers today. I don't know of any residential telco services (pots, ISDN BRI, or DSL) that has an active handoff they can test to without a truck roll. I don't know of any cable services with an active handoff similar to an ONT, although they can interrogate most cable boxes and modems for signal quality measurements remotely to get some idea of what is going on. On the flip side, when CableCo's provide POTS they must include a modem with a battery, and thus incur the cost of shipping new batteries out and old batteries back every ~5 years; which they sometimes do by truck roll... So it seems to me both of those services find things work just fine without an ONT-like test point. ONTs seem unique to FTTH deployments, of which most today are GPON... -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/