How to deploy with Zhone is to put it in the garbage. I have more than enough horror stories from the provider side of things and enough of their TAC literally screaming at me because I called out of regular hours how my problems are physical
fiber issues when it never is. They’ve also caused an 18 hour outage “Just trying to do some quick database cleanup” which worked, if you count wiping it as cleaning. Their GUI for ZMS is awful and their TAC doesn’t even know how to use it. It’s effectively
a dead product. Their #1 issue has always been their support but nothing ever seems to improve and I saw a lot of support managers keep rotating in and out while their actual engineers ever changed back when I paid attention.
From: NANOG <nanog-bounces@nanog.org> On Behalf Of
Nick Bogle
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2018 10:19 PM
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: A few GPON questions...
Hello fellow NANOG members :)
Let me start with a little bit of background, my day job is a Network Engineer for a local university where we have primarily a Cisco environment from phones to switching to routing, etc. Before my time, we hired a contractor to design
a GPON LAN system for a new building as a cost saving measure (though I am not sure how successful that was).
Either way, the contractor is about to hand the system off to us, and we have gone through the training and such, and I feel confident in my ability to manage the system, but we have a few questions that the manufacturer of our equipment
and our contractor didn't really want to answer. We are currently using a Dasan Zhone MXK-F1419 with several different downstream ONT models (all Zhone).
-We would like to consider use of 3rd party GPON B+ Optics on the linecards to add redundancy to the splitter (as the cost of 1st party are too high). Does anyone have experience with 3rd party vendors/compatibility/stability issues? We
were told they theoretically should work and just throw a log event, but it hasn't been tested. If so, what vendors would you recommend? So far all we've really seen are Ubiquiti and Fiberstore optics.
-As GPON is a standard itself, I'm aware interoperability between OLT and ONT vendors is heavily limited.. Does anyone have any experience using say, Zhone ONT's with a different model OLT, or Zhone ONT's with a different model OLT? I've
heard word that Zhone ONT's may be able to work with Nokia OLT's but it's technically not supported.
-We've already experienced some pretty big stability issues (have replaced 1 line card 5 times..), our contractor is saying it's just because we were a pretty early adopter of this line and that they've fixed it and fixed internal policies
to add additional QA and testing before shipping to customers. Does anyone have any experience with working with Zhone and their overall stability of components?
- Any other thoughts/gotchas/advice for deploying a GPON environment in a corporate LAN? (or about deploying a Zhone solution) It's pretty service provider oriented, and is incredible noticeable in the CLI.
Feel free to contact me offlist if you have any pertinent info that you don't want on the list.
Thanks,
Nick Bogle