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 nick@bogle.se
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 nick@bogle.se<mailto:nick@bogle.se>
Rip it out and run 9/125 SMF fiber home runs. Use BiDi SFPs to re-use your existing (likely SMF thankfully) cable plant. My opinion. -Ben. AS15206
On Dec 6, 2018, at 7:18 PM, Nick Bogle <nick@bogle.se> wrote:
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 nick@bogle.se
This, Rip it out Sorry this isn’t what you want to hear. 3rd party optics *may* work but when they don’t Zhone support will not help you. I recommend Zhone to my competitors. From: NANOG <nanog-bounces@nanog.org> on behalf of Ben Cannon <ben@6by7.net> Date: Tuesday, December 11, 2018 at 11:33 AM To: Nick Bogle <nick@bogle.se> Cc: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: A few GPON questions... Rip it out and run 9/125 SMF fiber home runs. Use BiDi SFPs to re-use your existing (likely SMF thankfully) cable plant. My opinion. -Ben. AS15206 On Dec 6, 2018, at 7:18 PM, Nick Bogle <nick@bogle.se<mailto:nick@bogle.se>> wrote: 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 nick@bogle.se<mailto:nick@bogle.se>
On Dec 11, 2018, at 11:32 AM, Ben Cannon <ben@6by7.net> wrote:
Rip it out and run 9/125 SMF fiber home runs. Use BiDi SFPs to re-use your existing (likely SMF thankfully) cable plant. My opinion.
There’s only so much space in conduits, risers and ducts. At some point, scale would press this up against physical infrastructure realities depending on how far the active gear at the head end is from the subscriber.
On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 at 17:30, Jason Lixfeld <jason+nanog@lixfeld.ca> wrote:
There’s only so much space in conduits, risers and ducts. At some point, scale would press this up against physical infrastructure realities depending on how far the active gear at the head end is from the subscriber.
A point made earlier was that typically in a campus environment, most every riser cupboard has access to power so you can easily build a regular Ethernet LAN with a switch on every floor/corridor/hub. Basically, everywhere that you'd put a GPON splitter. Aled
On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 05:36:47PM +0000, Aled Morris via NANOG wrote:
On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 at 17:30, Jason Lixfeld <jason+nanog@lixfeld.ca> wrote:
There’s only so much space in conduits, risers and ducts. At some point, scale would press this up against physical infrastructure realities depending on how far the active gear at the head end is from the subscriber.
A point made earlier was that typically in a campus environment, most every riser cupboard has access to power so you can easily build a regular Ethernet LAN with a switch on every floor/corridor/hub. Basically, everywhere that you'd put a GPON splitter.
And WDM gear if necessary...heck even passive CWDM if you have a riser space issue.
And WDM gear if necessary...heck even passive CWDM if you have a riser space issue.
WDM is much more expensive than GPON. I am still waiting for one of the 10G PON variants to become available. We want to deliver 10G to customers as >1G is becoming common on CPE Wi-Fi routers. But doing it with WDM is too expensive and p2p uses more fiber than we have. Regards Baldur
On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 07:07:49PM +0100, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
And WDM gear if necessary...heck even passive CWDM if you have a riser space issue.
WDM is much more expensive than GPON.
I am still waiting for one of the 10G PON variants to become available. We want to deliver 10G to customers as >1G is becoming common on CPE Wi-Fi routers. But doing it with WDM is too expensive and p2p uses more fiber than we have.
Passive CWDM is cheap and supports 10gig.
On 12/11/18 1:07 PM, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
I am still waiting for one of the 10G PON variants to become available. We want to deliver 10G to customers as >1G is becoming common on CPE Wi-Fi routers. But doing it with WDM is too expensive and p2p uses more fiber than we have.
XGS-PON is available now from some vendors. I know of at least one that's also already supporting NG-PON2 WDM-PON using the same cards and just different optics if you really want to go all the way to 52Gbps per PON (GPON + XGS-PON + 4xNG-PON2 lambdas). OLT-side, the pricing I've seen is actually pretty decent at maybe 2-3x the price per port of GPON despite having ~5x the capacity. ONT-side has a bit of an ouch factor at the moment (also 2-3x or more the price of a GPON ONT...), but if you've got someone who actually wants >1Gbps service and can charge accordingly, it's definitely out there. -- Brandon Martin
Sure but I can fit quite a lot of fiber in very little space. eg an 864 is approx 1” dia. Fan-outs can be done each floor, etc. And a single single mode strand has prodigious bandwidth available with the right optics. Bonus: if you did this 30 years ago, you’re still good. Anything else (remember FDDI grade Multi-mode?) is not future proof IMO. Basic 9/125 Singlemode always will be. In city wide deployments, a bit different, especially for eg residential service at economical pricing. GPON for sure has it’s place, I just don’t personally feel it’s inside a building all else being equal. - Ben Cannon, AS15206
On Dec 11, 2018, at 9:24 AM, Jason Lixfeld <jason+nanog@lixfeld.ca> wrote:
On Dec 11, 2018, at 11:32 AM, Ben Cannon <ben@6by7.net> wrote:
Rip it out and run 9/125 SMF fiber home runs. Use BiDi SFPs to re-use your existing (likely SMF thankfully) cable plant. My opinion.
There’s only so much space in conduits, risers and ducts. At some point, scale would press this up against physical infrastructure realities depending on how far the active gear at the head end is from the subscriber.
tir. 11. dec. 2018 19.03 skrev Ben Cannon <ben@6by7.net>:
Sure but I can fit quite a lot of fiber in very little space. eg an 864 is approx 1” dia.
Working with that much fiber is expensive. Too much work at each splice point. Huge inflexible cables. Expensive machinery to blow the fiber. Compare that to blowing a 24f cable of 4 mm into a 6 mm id and 10 mmu od duct. You can carry 24 times 128 users on that. Much more than the 25 mm monster cable running p2p. On top of that the multiduct has 12 of the smaller 10 mm subducts. You can blow additional cables as needed. Granted I have only worked with outside plant delivering FTTH. But I don't see why not for a campus. Regards Baldur
Fusion splicing .... ________________________________ From: NANOG <nanog-bounces@nanog.org> on behalf of Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl@gmail.com> Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2018 7:19 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: A few GPON questions... tir. 11. dec. 2018 19.03 skrev Ben Cannon <ben@6by7.net<mailto:ben@6by7.net>>: Sure but I can fit quite a lot of fiber in very little space. eg an 864 is approx 1” dia. Working with that much fiber is expensive. Too much work at each splice point. Huge inflexible cables. Expensive machinery to blow the fiber. Compare that to blowing a 24f cable of 4 mm into a 6 mm id and 10 mmu od duct. You can carry 24 times 128 users on that. Much more than the 25 mm monster cable running p2p. On top of that the multiduct has 12 of the smaller 10 mm subducts. You can blow additional cables as needed. Granted I have only worked with outside plant delivering FTTH. But I don't see why not for a campus. Regards Baldur
On Dec 11, 2018, at 10:01 , Ben Cannon <ben@6by7.net> wrote:
Sure but I can fit quite a lot of fiber in very little space. eg an 864 is approx 1” dia.
Fan-outs can be done each floor, etc. And a single single mode strand has prodigious bandwidth available with the right optics.
Bonus: if you did this 30 years ago, you’re still good. Anything else (remember FDDI grade Multi-mode?) is not future proof IMO. Basic 9/125 Singlemode always will be.
In city wide deployments, a bit different, especially for eg residential service at economical pricing. GPON for sure has it’s place, I just don’t personally feel it’s inside a building all else being equal.
I’d actually argue that even if you’re going to do GPON on a wide distribution, the economics these days make a pretty good case for future-proofing with home-run fiber and putting your splitters and GPON gear in the same location. The link budgets turn out to be identical regardless of how far upstream the splitter is and once you dig the trench, the cost of the fiber itself is relatively cheap. Home run means you aren’t locked into the PON topology if something better comes along in the future. It also opens up the potential to support competition (which I realize may be considered a detractor by some). Owen
- Ben Cannon, AS15206
On Dec 11, 2018, at 9:24 AM, Jason Lixfeld <jason+nanog@lixfeld.ca> wrote:
On Dec 11, 2018, at 11:32 AM, Ben Cannon <ben@6by7.net> wrote:
Rip it out and run 9/125 SMF fiber home runs. Use BiDi SFPs to re-use your existing (likely SMF thankfully) cable plant. My opinion.
There’s only so much space in conduits, risers and ducts. At some point, scale would press this up against physical infrastructure realities depending on how far the active gear at the head end is from the subscriber.
We think it makes sense for cost reduction for semi rural or suburban aerial distribution- reducing the fiber count to like. 12. Reduces costs dramatically vs say a 288 count and all the splicing. (Ribbons are better) -Ben
On Dec 11, 2018, at 10:49 AM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
On Dec 11, 2018, at 10:01 , Ben Cannon <ben@6by7.net> wrote:
Sure but I can fit quite a lot of fiber in very little space. eg an 864 is approx 1” dia.
Fan-outs can be done each floor, etc. And a single single mode strand has prodigious bandwidth available with the right optics.
Bonus: if you did this 30 years ago, you’re still good. Anything else (remember FDDI grade Multi-mode?) is not future proof IMO. Basic 9/125 Singlemode always will be.
In city wide deployments, a bit different, especially for eg residential service at economical pricing. GPON for sure has it’s place, I just don’t personally feel it’s inside a building all else being equal.
I’d actually argue that even if you’re going to do GPON on a wide distribution, the economics these days make a pretty good case for future-proofing with home-run fiber and putting your splitters and GPON gear in the same location. The link budgets turn out to be identical regardless of how far upstream the splitter is and once you dig the trench, the cost of the fiber itself is relatively cheap.
Home run means you aren’t locked into the PON topology if something better comes along in the future. It also opens up the potential to support competition (which I realize may be considered a detractor by some).
Owen
- Ben Cannon, AS15206
On Dec 11, 2018, at 9:24 AM, Jason Lixfeld <jason+nanog@lixfeld.ca> wrote:
On Dec 11, 2018, at 11:32 AM, Ben Cannon <ben@6by7.net> wrote:
Rip it out and run 9/125 SMF fiber home runs. Use BiDi SFPs to re-use your existing (likely SMF thankfully) cable plant. My opinion.
There’s only so much space in conduits, risers and ducts. At some point, scale would press this up against physical infrastructure realities depending on how far the active gear at the head end is from the subscriber.
I wish this was an option.... There isn't any budget for ripping out this system and we are already contractually obliged to deploy GPON in another building that will be coming online in 2-3 years. We've severed the contract beyond that already. That being said.... We have ~580 ONTs (remember, we are deploying fiber to the user, not to the MDF. There is no network closet.) To deploy a Cisco compact switch or something similar would cost ~1,000/ea plus $200 minimum for third party optics, then to add a large enough fiber distribution switch for that many ports would be astronomically expensive. It was a poor desicion that will have to be maintained for the next ~25 years until the next remodel thanks to our previous non technical administration listening to the sales people over the previous network administration team. On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 8:32 AM Ben Cannon <ben@6by7.net> wrote:
Rip it out and run 9/125 SMF fiber home runs. Use BiDi SFPs to re-use your existing (likely SMF thankfully) cable plant. My opinion.
-Ben. AS15206
On Dec 6, 2018, at 7:18 PM, Nick Bogle <nick@bogle.se> wrote:
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 nick@bogle.se
Campus network deployments are expensive, by their very nature. You are deploying a *lot* of capacity over a not-insignificant footprint. If your building has been constructed sans wiring closets, then I can forsee other issues in your future - Will you be deploying WiFi on site? If so, where do you intend to situate the Switches/ONTs+PoE injectors for those? I wouldn't put my name to this. ~A
Ceiling tiles. There is a special ceiling tile that drops down that maintains our 24 port ONTs that do PoE+ to our Cisco WAPs. It's most definitely isn't what I would have chosen to do. On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 11:30 AM Alfie Pates <alfie@fdx.services> wrote:
Campus network deployments are expensive, by their very nature. You are deploying a *lot* of capacity over a not-insignificant footprint.
If your building has been constructed sans wiring closets, then I can forsee other issues in your future - Will you be deploying WiFi on site? If so, where do you intend to situate the Switches/ONTs+PoE injectors for those?
I wouldn't put my name to this.
~A
The first question to ask yourself is: Why does this need to be GPON? The primary advantage of GPON is that it's *passive* (on the distribution side, at least) - this makes it ideal for building networks where most of your infrastructure located in places that getting power is infeasible: for instance, common residential fibre networks where most of your infrastructure lives on unpowered poles or in ducts/chambers. I have not yet come across a network closet which doesn't have provisions for power: If this is a small-to-medium sized campus network you'd be better served by running ordinary optical ethernet and dropping switches where you need to aggregate capacity. GPON is a rabbit hole that you do not want to go down, if you can feasibly avoid it: Ordinary ethernet is simply easier. ~a
On 12/6/18 10:18 PM, Nick Bogle wrote:
-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.
I mean, it'll probably work, but considering the extra requirements placed on PON optics and the relatively low cost of them compared to the rest of the system, I'd be inclined to stick with either ones sold by your vendor or at least buying something they re-label from an authorized distributor of the OEM.
-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.
Yeah, good luck with that. There's some limited degree of interoperability, but you'll often lose management features, at minimum. Some GPON OLT vendors do have a limited list of "qualified" 3rd party ONTs that they maintain for when their 1st-party ones don't fit the bill. Stick to 1st-party when you can and drop to "qualified" 3rd party ones if you absolutely have to. Anything else is going to be a support and maintenance nightmare.
-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?
Um, GPON is well established in the field. If you've got stability issues, letting your vendor blame it on being an "early adopter" is total BS. Now if you were deploying NG-PON2 or something, I'd maybe, MAYBE let it slide as long as they gave me a good support contact.
- 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.
No idea why people think it's a good idea for corporate deployments. The whole point of a PON is that you don't have to have active elements in the field. That's usually of little consequence in a corporate or even academic campus environment. I'd just stick to active-E. -- Brandon Martin
Hello We run a small FTTH internet service provider using Zhone MXK198 switches. This is an older discontinued platform and since Zhone and Dasan merged, there might be nothing but the name in common with your equipment. Anyway, ours are stable and in five years on about 15 switches, we only have had one crash. Fixed after a power cycle. This is however the kind of equipment that you only run tested and verified setup on. Lots of stuff does not work quite as it should, but when you find a good configuration and stay with that, it is good. There are some strange things, like vlan 7 being reserved and unusable. When used with fs.com GPON sfp modules, it will work if the port has had a genuine Zhone sfp installed previously. However after a reboot it will reject the module. You then need to shift your genuine module through all the ports to activate them. The switch will reject other brands of ONU/ONT. Contrary to what they tell you, this is not because of lacking standards. There is a secret setting (which I don't have) that will make it accept third party ONU. Likewise if the ONU is programmed with the Zhone vendor code, it will be accepted. We are currently looking at cheaper options that do not come with vendor locks for SFP and ONU. Regards Baldur tir. 11. dec. 2018 16.45 skrev Nick Bogle <nick@bogle.se>:
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 nick@bogle.se
On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 7:44 AM Nick Bogle <nick@bogle.se> wrote:
local university [...] we hired a contractor to design a GPON LAN system for a new building as a cost saving measure
Hi Nick, Do I correctly understand that you're using GPON *inside* the building for connecting stations to the wiring closets rather than connecting the wiring closets back to campus IT central? Truly using it for the LAN and not the campus WAN? Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>
Bill, That is correct. We are running SMF from our Datacenter to the end users desk in the building and providing either in wall 4 port ONTs or desktop 8-16 port ONTs. Everywhere there would be a traditional 3 port CAT6 network jack there is a APC fiber jack and/or an in wall ONT. On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 10:26 AM William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 7:44 AM Nick Bogle <nick@bogle.se> wrote:
local university [...] we hired a contractor to design a GPON LAN system for a new building as a cost saving measure
Hi Nick,
Do I correctly understand that you're using GPON *inside* the building for connecting stations to the wiring closets rather than connecting the wiring closets back to campus IT central? Truly using it for the LAN and not the campus WAN?
Regards, Bill Herrin
-- William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>
On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 10:59 AM Nick Bogle <nick@bogle.se> wrote:
That is correct. We are running SMF from our Datacenter to the end users desk in the building and providing either in wall 4 port ONTs or desktop 8-16 port ONTs. Everywhere there would be a traditional 3 port CAT6 network jack there is a APC fiber jack and/or an in wall ONT.
Hi Nick, Yikes! That's upside down even for PON. The P is for Passive. The whole idea is to not have powered infrastructure in inconvenient locations because that's expensive and super hard to reliably maintain. I think maybe you've found yourself in a "throwing good money after bad" situation. You have the LAN equivalent of motion sensor lighting in the restroom. Sounds great until you realize the maximum delay setting is 15 minutes... how many dark #2s before you have to bite the bullet and take it out? This is going to cost you cash and productivity for as long as you keep trying to make it work. Moreover, the combination of inflexibility and elevated incidence of outages will consume the occupants' productivity as well. There will never be a less expensive time to install a classic (copper) cabling infrastructure than before the building is occupied. This is where you dip in to the organization's contingency funds and take the political hit. And for the love of God, break the contract for the next building. Even if you have to pay it out and just lose the money, save yourself the expense of ever having to operate it. If they won't take your word for it, get an external networking company to do an impact and cost analysis so you can show the administration what they'll lose by continuing this folly. I'll bet your contractor had some questions they didn't want to answer. If I'd sold you this bill of goods there'd be questions I wouldn't want to answer too. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>
The cost analysis was already done. The cost is around 10% less. The implications are there is no redundancy, lacking capacity, costs were not factored in for BBUs on every ONT like should have been spec'd out for emergency phone lines, etc. After that was done management said to suck it up and make it work. Unfortunately we're beyond stuck with it at this point as the second building is already under construction and the first buildings grand opening is January 1st. On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 12:04 PM William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 10:59 AM Nick Bogle <nick@bogle.se> wrote:
That is correct. We are running SMF from our Datacenter to the end users desk in the building and providing either in wall 4 port ONTs or desktop 8-16 port ONTs. Everywhere there would be a traditional 3 port CAT6 network jack there is a APC fiber jack and/or an in wall ONT.
Hi Nick,
Yikes! That's upside down even for PON. The P is for Passive. The whole idea is to not have powered infrastructure in inconvenient locations because that's expensive and super hard to reliably maintain.
I think maybe you've found yourself in a "throwing good money after bad" situation. You have the LAN equivalent of motion sensor lighting in the restroom. Sounds great until you realize the maximum delay setting is 15 minutes... how many dark #2s before you have to bite the bullet and take it out?
This is going to cost you cash and productivity for as long as you keep trying to make it work. Moreover, the combination of inflexibility and elevated incidence of outages will consume the occupants' productivity as well. There will never be a less expensive time to install a classic (copper) cabling infrastructure than before the building is occupied. This is where you dip in to the organization's contingency funds and take the political hit.
And for the love of God, break the contract for the next building. Even if you have to pay it out and just lose the money, save yourself the expense of ever having to operate it. If they won't take your word for it, get an external networking company to do an impact and cost analysis so you can show the administration what they'll lose by continuing this folly.
I'll bet your contractor had some questions they didn't want to answer. If I'd sold you this bill of goods there'd be questions I wouldn't want to answer too.
Regards, Bill Herrin
-- William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>
The cost analysis was already done.
Costs were not factored in for BBUs on every ONT like should have been spec'd out for emergency phone lines. These two things do not quite agree.
Update your CV - It is not your responsibility to shoulder the stress of your superiors' bad decisions, especially if you have no room to learn from those mistakes. ~a
On 12/11/18 12:32 PM, Alfie Pates wrote:
The cost analysis was already done.
Costs were not factored in for BBUs on every ONT like should have been spec'd out for emergency phone lines.
These two things do not quite agree.
I'm sure management did some kind of cost analysis, but ignored normal IT things like POE for things like phones and cameras. POE is super convenient in a LAN environment. But management doesn't know or usually care about that. I'd have asked the PON guys hey, what's your solution for POE delivery to powered devices? I bet factoring that in alone would have blown the PON cost up. I can't imagine doing anything as insane as PON in a LAN environment. But everyone knows fiber is the best and you must eliminate all that silly copper, with helpful prodding from vendor sales. Could be sales didn't want IT involved because they knew IT will kill the deal, and some management will fall for that because these sales guys must be the experts. Problems later? The IT guy will deal with it. I've had jobs where management refused to consult with or consider suggestions from IT. I once was part of an office move where the modular furniture vendor started asking questions about cabling was entering and port locations blah blah. They were told by management they don't need to know that and IT will just figure it out later. The vendor was like no way, they need to be involved now or we won't proceed. Then IT was brought in at the last minute, but if the furniture vendor hadn't refused to proceed the plan was literally F the IT guys and make them figure it out all the cabling over the weekend before everyone was to move in. Management like that just gets worse until you line up another job and quit.
I remember working for this little company called EDS... Some bright spark decided that ATM to the desktop was the future (not this ethernet (or even token ring) thing) and subsequently converted several thousand head office machines to E3 or OC3 to the desktop. Hell of a thing trying to make OS2 drivers work for an OC3 card. That went very badly and the whole lot was ripped out again after a couple of years from memory. -----Original Message----- From: NANOG <nanog-bounces@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Seth Mattinen Sent: Wednesday, 12 December 2018 9:59 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: A few GPON questions... I've had jobs where management refused to consult with or consider suggestions from IT. I once was part of an office move where the modular furniture vendor started asking questions about cabling was entering and port locations blah blah. They were told by management they don't need to know that and IT will just figure it out later. The vendor was like no way, they need to be involved now or we won't proceed. Then IT was brought in at the last minute, but if the furniture vendor hadn't refused to proceed the plan was literally F the IT guys and make them figure it out all the cabling over the weekend before everyone was to move in. Management like that just gets worse until you line up another job and quit.
On Tue, 11 Dec 2018 at 21:16, Tony Wicks <tony@wicks.co.nz> wrote:
I remember working for this little company called EDS... Some bright spark decided that ATM to the desktop was the future (not this ethernet (or even token ring) thing) and subsequently converted several thousand head office machines to E3 or OC3 to the desktop. Hell of a thing trying to make OS2 drivers work for an OC3 card. That went very badly and the whole lot was ripped out again after a couple of years from memory.
Same thing happened in BA's shiny new office block near Heathrow back in the 90's. ATM25 to the desktop and LANE. Total disaster. Allegedly. Aled
Unfortunately management didn't want an apple to apple comparison. They wanted a comparison to how it was spec'd out originally not how we typically deploy it now. I don't think this is a deal breaker for my job, we have 50+ buildings left to manage, and our contractor is responsible for maintaining it for the most part for the next year at minimum. The previous management (CIO/CTO/their assistants) were pretty much fired over this fiasco. New management is much better to deal with. On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 12:35 PM Alfie Pates <alfie@fdx.services> wrote:
The cost analysis was already done.
Costs were not factored in for BBUs on every ONT like should have been spec'd out for emergency phone lines.
These two things do not quite agree.
Update your CV - It is not your responsibility to shoulder the stress of your superiors' bad decisions, especially if you have no room to learn from those mistakes.
~a
Rip it out. Where are your splitters? You can probably fix this with PoE 8-port switches and UPS-es. Every day you wait will cost more. You will never get 25 years out of this, I predict 6mos and then you rip it completely and put in copper/IDFs. -Ben
On Dec 11, 2018, at 1:04 PM, Nick Bogle <nick@bogle.se> wrote:
Unfortunately management didn't want an apple to apple comparison. They wanted a comparison to how it was spec'd out originally not how we typically deploy it now. I don't think this is a deal breaker for my job, we have 50+ buildings left to manage, and our contractor is responsible for maintaining it for the most part for the next year at minimum. The previous management (CIO/CTO/their assistants) were pretty much fired over this fiasco. New management is much better to deal with.
On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 12:35 PM Alfie Pates <alfie@fdx.services> wrote:
The cost analysis was already done.
Costs were not factored in for BBUs on every ONT like should have been spec'd out for emergency phone lines.
These two things do not quite agree.
Update your CV - It is not your responsibility to shoulder the stress of your superiors' bad decisions, especially if you have no room to learn from those mistakes.
~a
I’ve used this guy a couple times, Use your favorite switch/POE switch and viola PON network using switches. Pretty sure it doesn’t work with Zhone… But Zhone is #88 in my list of PON vendor choices ;) https://supportforums.adtran.com/docs/DOC-8697 From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Ben Cannon Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2018 2:11 PM To: Nick Bogle Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: A few GPON questions... Rip it out. Where are your splitters? You can probably fix this with PoE 8-port switches and UPS-es. Every day you wait will cost more. You will never get 25 years out of this, I predict 6mos and then you rip it completely and put in copper/IDFs. -Ben On Dec 11, 2018, at 1:04 PM, Nick Bogle <nick@bogle.se<mailto:nick@bogle.se>> wrote: Unfortunately management didn't want an apple to apple comparison. They wanted a comparison to how it was spec'd out originally not how we typically deploy it now. I don't think this is a deal breaker for my job, we have 50+ buildings left to manage, and our contractor is responsible for maintaining it for the most part for the next year at minimum. The previous management (CIO/CTO/their assistants) were pretty much fired over this fiasco. New management is much better to deal with. On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 12:35 PM Alfie Pates <alfie@fdx.services<mailto:alfie@fdx.services>> wrote:
The cost analysis was already done.
Costs were not factored in for BBUs on every ONT like should have been spec'd out for emergency phone lines.
These two things do not quite agree. Update your CV - It is not your responsibility to shoulder the stress of your superiors' bad decisions, especially if you have no room to learn from those mistakes. ~a
On 12/11/18 4:40 PM, Jameson, Daniel wrote:
I’ve used this guy a couple times, Use your favorite switch/POE switch and viola PON network using switches. Pretty sure it doesn’t work with Zhone… But Zhone is #88 in my list of PON vendor choices ;)
My Adtran salesperson has told me on a few occasions that they don't recommend those things anymore and may even have discontinued them. Apparently they were never especially stable. Of course, your mileage may vary. I agree it would be an amazingly useful product if indeed it works well. I've also been told that the EPON version they offer is fine, so who knows. -- Brandon Martin
I have tested a variety of equipment as part of my FTTH enterprise. Active Ethernet is where I’m still sitting because I’m not quite happy with some of the PON hardware out there personally. Yes active solutions provide more flexibility in one area but they are only viable in dense environments where the cost to build is already high and the fiber count is cheap comparably. If you are within the b+ optics link budget there are options, but if you are spliced at your splitters any migration may be tricky. I’ve been doing 2F drop to the home so I can later to technology migration as the cost variance is about 7c for 1F vs 10c/ft for 2F. It’s a bit more as those drops are the longer portion vs the backbone legs, but I can change from active to GPON or back without trouble. It sounds like you have a typical vendor management problem where the equipment isn’t meeting your needs. Find a way to migrate to something else. Hopefully you have spare plant and budget to move to something else. If it’s homes, hopefully you can do a migration without coordination and entering the home, if it’s office campus see if you can DWDM or CWDM to get the capacity you need or there are other hardware like the UBNT OLT out there. A lot of the smaller FTTH types are also using the Huwaei hardware. Qualifying a vendor is hard and they change. I’ve spent decades working with my vendors trying to encourage them to do the right thing. The story you tell is a typical one of overworked employees without the power to fix the problems they see. As others said I would consider a change as your business risk may be too high. This is where network operation becomes business risk mitigation. - Jared Sent from my iCar
On Dec 6, 2018, at 10:18 PM, Nick Bogle <nick@bogle.se> wrote:
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 nick@bogle.se
participants (17)
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Aled Morris -
Alfie Pates -
Anderson, Charles R -
Baldur Norddahl -
Ben Cannon -
Brandon Martin -
Chris Gross -
Jameson, Daniel -
Jared Mauch -
Jason Lixfeld -
Matthew Crocker -
Nick Bogle -
Owen DeLong -
Rod Beck -
Seth Mattinen -
Tony Wicks -
William Herrin