With respect, I'm not overthinking anything, I don't think these things are even particularly likely, I'm just interested to know how things work and how they may fail.
Luckily for me all my fibre runs will be underground except it looks like the last foot or so. Our FTTC cabinet is on a relatively busy city centre street so that has far more chance of being driven into, pee'd in, etc etc.
In terms of deliberate or malicious intent. A bit of digging reveals some white hat security vulnerabilities on particular French GPON implementations a few years ago. Note that there has no immediate correlation to any present day GPON here in the UK, but nonetheless makes for interesting reading....
https://pierrekim.github.io/blog/2016-11-01-gpon-ftt...
My reading of the above is as a ‘theoretical’ discovery into the means to obtain ‘free’ gigabit capable service rather than service disruption itself. Although the author claims to have contacted Orange about the vulnerabilities....
Other brute force techniques (that could see you in front of a magistrate) could simply involve injecting 1310 nm light in the upstream. That would be akin to operating a radio frequency jammer on GPS, mobile or other terrestrial frequencies - so a a pretty quick way to land yourself in deep [censored]. Wouldn’t be that hard to work out who either...
In terms of equipment failure, there is little to suggest that the optics/lasers used inside ONT/ONUs could suddenly and unexpectedly fail ‘on’ / effectively get stuck transmitting ‘1’. Indeed proactive and reactive monitoring in the OLT should see any unexpected optical behaviour and send shutdown messages to the ONU before it becomes a potential nuisance. Otherwise I guess it’s an engineer visit to replace it.
As said all rather esoteric and rather theoretical, and rather more mundane failures in the outside plant would be waaaaay more likely.
Enjoy your connection when it arrives. 👍😀
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