Back to topic a bit, this is what we use for Active Ethernet in a group of neighborhoods, servicing up to 576 ports/customers per cabinet.
This is a parts list, I’m leaving costs out because I need to revise that on my own sheets. A 5’ cabinet with dual doors, a sun shield top and battery compartment underneath. It has standard 21 or 19 inch rack which is configurable and on both sides. It has plenty of clearance for the front and back between doors and racks. It has enough space on the sides in 19” config to install managed rack mount cable runners with covers. It also has triple booted entry from the bottom compartment. The bottom battery compartment has a sliding tray which doesn’t go all the way back, so there is room for our conduit from the cement pad. We have electricians install the meter directly on the outside and outlets inside and do conduit for the power connection to utility. At the top of the rack we have a 4U 576 count LC connector patch/panel system. I forget the name of the brand/company, but they are not cheap. They insert like cartridges/system from the back in 144 count sections I think. They come pre-made fully populated to length desired. We order them with 50’ usually and they are run through the conduit underneath the cabinet out to the curb splice cases. So splicing is only done in the splice trailer from the curb pulling in the loop of cable from the cabinet and the mainline cable from the neighborhood. That is most of the labor, the onetime splice of all that pre-made cable onto the various neighborhood drops. This standardizes all of our systems to one vendor/style, where at the beginning we were using a lot more rack space installing standard 144 4U panels that are crap. We purchase an AC unit and mount it on the side, plug it in to the UPS. We purchase an Alpha UPS 4U rackmount system and put it on the bottom, usually not even really mounted, just sitting at the bottom. That connects to a fouir battery array in the bottom of the cabinet, which is not a part of the air conditioning. The UPS monitors temp on batteries with a separate cable and charges/discharges accordingly. The rest is just switches and maybe one high powered router, usually a CCR 1072 that does the backbone ring. Most of what we use has dual power supplies so I put one side on UPS and the other directly on main power. That’s just because I don’t fully trust the UPS and want the site to remain running if the UPS itself malfunctions. I use UBNT 8 port power strips to monitor power usage and control outlets, mFi controllers to monitor cabinet doors and temperature. So about half the power is drawn from these power strips plugged in to the UPS and the other half through these power strips plugged in to mains. If the power strip fails, which they tend to do over time, then we are still running, just have to go replace it. We now use standard 1U 48 port switches with dual independent 10Gbps lines out on the ring, expandable to 40Gbps or higher uplink per site. So 48 ports or more per U if using SFP+ switch which might have 60+ SFP ports or even 96 ports. At twelve units or less, we are at capacity for the panel at 576 connections. That leaves a couple of U left in the cabinet if we need it. It also exceeds the standard 15 amp circuit, maybe even a 20amp if fully loaded. None of ours are fully loaded to that extent yet, so I might have to add or upgrade the power to some of these cabinets. I’m currently paying aboiut $240 a cabinet a month for power for maybe a third of the cabinet usage? So it could get expensive, hot and power hungry if fully loaded. That’s one of the big negatives for Active deployment. But it’s easy to start with and shouldn’t be hard to migrate to GPON gradually inside those cabinets. Distance from cabinet to homes is never very far, usually well under a mile. So we don’t even worry about costing path db. That probably still won’t be an issue with GPON of any kind. I am going to migrate to some fast standard of GPON before I hit unreasonable levels of power usage. I just haven’t decided which brand since it’s not as ‘open’ as AE yet when talking about vendor equipment interoperating.
