Openreach to deploy Nokia GPON solution,ONT change required?

https://mobilenewscwp.co.uk/Unified-Comms/article/op...

Saw this and considering the whole Huawei 'will it stay or will it go' situation I was wondering if anyone knew if it's lilely that existing Huawei ONTs are likely to be replaced by Nokia ones (which would make sense so they come under a single management environment)
Presumably my ISP will be in touch to arrange an OR visit or is this something I can ask them to do proactively when things return to normal so I can be sure I'm available for them to do it?

I appreciate it might be a little early to ask but as I know there's a few 'in the know' here I thought I'd ask anyway.

Edited by techguy (Tue 26-May-20 21:09:15)

The previous plan was to leave Huawei ONT and full fibre kit in place and this to be under 35% of the network but the changes rumoured around Huawei/Government may change that.

The Nokia story on its own does not mean Openreach is about to replace existing Huawei ONT

Am not bothered either way really as of course it's their kit but just wondered if I'm likely to have a service visit to change it.

I much prefer the arrangement that I'm only responsible for the router.

techguy

BT has historically always wanted two suppliers in each technology area for security of supply and to prevent being held over a barrel.

FTTC was ECI and Huawei, the Huawei kit was good flexible upgradable, ECI failed to meet the upgrade path and has been dropped and replaced by Nokia ( who were slow to enter the market but were the tortoise to ECI's hare).

FTTP kit needed the second supplier for security of supply and Nokia fits nicely. This doesn't mean that any Huawei ones will be changed out, just that they will not have the whole market to themselves.

I imagine the ONT has little or no data communication capability, so its manufacturer irrelevant as long as it perfoms to specification?

Anything it does know about and wishes to feed back would by definition be transmitted upstream so fairly easily detected by anything other than a Huawei (or other Chinese manufactured) destination.

Edited by RobertoS (Wed 27-May-20 00:10:51)

One would imagine that Openreach would probably want to be replacing the Huawai headend kit anyway at some point as it can't cope with XGS-PON, which given the kit they have selected from Nokia indicates that's the route they aim to go down (thankfully). Might mean we get 10G faster than we might have previously given they will have to remove all the none XGS-PON capable kit.

Doesn't solve the massive headache though of replacing the ONT's though.

Edited by deleted (Wed 27-May-20 08:25:36)

But if the ONT is dumb wrt significant data, with easily reverse engineered software?

In other words only transmitting its serial number and suchlike.

I expect there are some here who know.

Edited by RobertoS (Wed 27-May-20 09:20:00)

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

But if the ONT is dumb wrt significant data, with easily reverse engineered software?

Amongst other things the ONT is responsible for:
* encrypting and decrypting the traffic
* transmitting at allocated times so that two different devices aren't sending on the uplink simultaneously

The latter is very sophisticated: timeslots are allocated by the OLT, dynamically in response to uplink demand, and the OLT even measures and takes into account the different round-trip times to different ONTs.

There *are* standards for GPON, but in practice, various issues arise when you try to use one manufacturer's ONT with a different manufacturer's OLT.

Interesting info the upstream multiplexing and yes that would be enough to cause interoperability between different manufactures. The serialisation and the encryption should be using standards (unless you do a Crypto AG)

Replacing the ont though would be a case of power down, remove the optical cable and connect to new ont and power back up?

While also synchronising a move to the other OLT to ensure interoperability and as its not one fibre per ONT at the headend, you need to synchronise a lot of ONT changes at the same time.

OR be very confident that interoperability is NOT an issue.