On 12 October 2015 at 18:25, Jameson, Daniel <Daniel.Jameson@tdstelecom.com> wrote:
There should never be a need to attenuate a PON port unless you're working directly on the OLT (You should work through a splitter even directly in the CO/HE)
Here is a small secret: If you attenuate the PON port so the signal level at the OLT is as low as possible, your network will be more robust against people connecting P2P fiber media converters to your network. This is because these devices typically have TX power that is significantly less than your ONUs. By attenuate the signal you can bring the rogue signal below the detection threshold of the OLT. In my experience one way to do this is to always use 1:128 splits. Even if you are only going to connect less than 32 ONUs, you will find that 1:128 can be more robust. In fact I discovered this little trick after we started using 1:128 splits (for flexibility, not because we actually connect that many clients). Because the fiber plant is shared with other service providers, we used to have OLT crashes due to people connecting a media converter they got from another service provider. I found that we had zero of these issues where we had 1:128 splits. Btw we use class C+ optics. This might work out differently if you have class B optics. Regards, Baldur