In reply to a post by XGS_Is_On:

The ECI OLTs have no switching fabric so all the GPON ports on the card are backhauled by gigabit ports on the same card. Each CP needed a Cablelink to each line card.

And how many PON ports on a linecard?

jpm

They were very early in the market. I looked at their kit during an ITT in 2004. It was based on having a wavelength for BB and a Wavelength for TV distribution. Back then it was state of the art way ahead of any other supplier but with hindsight ( always very useful!) it was designed for situations that have not arisen in the UK. ( not allowed regulatory wise at the time ) .

Dependant on generation of the HiFocus chassis - I think from a quick search they were GPLT4 line cards - 4 PON ports per line card.

Kitcat doubtless would be able to confirm.

And you need a separate cablelink per line card, not per chassis?? Sheesh.

I can't think many ISPs would want to buy a 1G cablelink just to serve a handful of customers (although it's a theoretical maximum 128 on 4 PON ports)

From what I can tell it looks like these early Hi-FOCuS MSAN chassis have two supervisor cards (what they call IPNI) each with 8 x SC uplink ports. The line cards have a dual ‘star’ connection back to each IPNI - rather than a non-blocking backbone switching matrix as is now commonplace. I would expect that any cablelinks are connected to the IPNI uplink ports.

Could be totally wrong though 🤣

You have been busy with your research Detective crazy/tasty poultry guy 🤣

🤣🤣…define ‘research’ Inspector; is it flicking between the newspaper, breakfast and phone on a sunny Saturday morning? Tasty poultry guy out 😎

Pheasant

Racking my brain for the answer, I think you are correct with 4 PONs per line card, but the backhaul was no off the cards but of a different card with multiple Ge potentially. so Not 128 per Ge backhaul.

They were not originally designed for multiple operators to connect to ( Nowhere else in the world had that requirement as they were all vertically integrated operators) but to be able to aggregate across multiple Ge to the same end point. In 2004 no-one was considering needing more than a couple of Ge for BB and 10Ge ports were only used in the Core. The Supervisor cards also handled the 'TV' signals and were resilient. ( Total Internet bandwidth was only about 40Gb nationally) see https://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/1664-top-10-fast... for high speed internet in 2004!!

Thank you Kitcat. This is what I found in an FCC archive! taken from an Hi-FOCuS 960E DSLAM doc. This might have been a generation later c.2007 tech!!

System overview

Front chassis, view of card arrangement

Supervisor cards (IPNI) had the uplinks, 8 x SC apparently. Internal connection was via 1G (but they also mention 10G?) links, so called ‘dual star’ from each line card back to each supervisor card. Non-blocking / switching fabric wasn’t a thing just yet in ECI land

Pheasant
Recollections that the earliest variant was nicknamed the pizza box as it was that size and had a PON of 64 (feeding 1st and 2nd splitters of 8) with 1 pair of resilient Ge back to the Backhaul via a edge router. It wasn't really scalable.

Apart from at Ebbsfleet (Greenfield new town) BT was not allowed to rollout FTTP at that point as it would have prevented other ISPs from providing service by LLU. It took a number of years to get developments made so that regulatory approval was agreed (despite Sky and TalkTalks objections) and the present FTTP design rolled out.