Mike Hammett kind of touched on what I was asking and why. I was told that Metronet near me had a hut in Batavia that also served St. Charles, Geneva, West Chicago, etc. via PON.
Also a company that built a middle mile / anchor institution fiber network with a BTOP grant 12+ years ago convinced the county to let them take it private, and they have run aerial fiber in most of Shabbona which is one of the towns Mike mentioned. With my misconception about how FTTH is typically deployed, I expected there to be at least one cabinet or hut in town. But I think they are just using strands from the BTOP project and feeding it passively from a distant town. I would prefer to see more redundancy, especially since both buried and aerial fiber definitely gets damaged around here, but I guess practical results matter more than what-ifs. At least local power outages shouldn’t take it down, and a central NOC or hut should be able to have serious battery and/or generator backup. From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Josh Luthman Sent: Saturday, March 16, 2024 4:12 PM To: AnimalFarm Microwave Users Group <af@af.afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] PON question PON is one port at your end and then goes through splitters that reduce light and add ports to end up at customer ONTs. 1:128 is pretty short range and high customer count - we could never do that in a rural plant (5-15 miles). Maybe 1:64 but that's about the limit. There is NO redundancy in PON. Best you could do is 2x32 or whatever splitters which is where you feed the downstream fiber with two PON ports. An engineer from Metronet told me they did that but no one could ever answer why (technically or operationally). Think like you have an AP on a tower feeding 32 customers. What are the chances you have an AP right below it with the same SSID/PSK/frequency for the customers to connect to if the first AP goes down? Think of Active E like a bunch of dumb switches. You have a 48 port switch that goes to 48 customers using 48 fibers. If the fiber feeding the switch goes down, it can go to a different fiber/uplink port. On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 7:59 PM Ken Hohhof <khoh...@kwom.com <mailto:khoh...@kwom.com> > wrote: Since there are FTTH people here and I’m mostly ignorant of such things, maybe someone can clear something up for me. I always assumed a PON based FTTH system had a topology kind of like HFC. I expected fiber down the street with splitters, but fed by some sort of neighborhood node in a cabinet with power and electronics, fed by active EPL style fiber. Which could have redundant paths, rings, etc. so a fiber cut wouldn’t take down a whole town or multiple towns, the backbone traffic would reroute. I’ve been told this is not the case. And that instead, each PON could go back over a strand to a headend several towns and many miles away, all passive. Sorry for the poor description of my question, hopefully you can figure out what I’m asking. -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com <mailto:AF@af.afmug.com> http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
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