The ONT

My good friend had FTTP installed last Wednesday. An out of the ordinary installation as the Openreach engineer (on loan from Northern Ireland) ran the fibre from the U/G node point, fitted the CSP on the outside of the house and proceeded to to do the internal wiring to an ONT in the rear bedroom. Connected up the router and everything was up and running by 16:15. The ONT had the usual three green lights showing.

The next day another Openreach engineer (on loan from the Manchester area) arrived at 09:20 saying he was here to install FTTP. Was advised the job was done yesterday and he departed. He was back about 30 minutes later, saying that his job sheet showed that the wrong ONT had been installed and it was necessary to replace it with the correct one. Task completed in just a few minutes and departed saying that if the ONT had not been replaced, then the old unit would have failed within a matter of days.

What the hell was all that about? Speedtest results are no different with the new unit in place. And what triggered Openreach to rush out to change the ONT?

My friend is on the EDGWARE exchange.

Edited by trolleybus (Sun 27-Jul-25 14:56:33)

ONT with 1Gb ethernet port replaced by ONT with 2.5Gb (or greater) ethernet port?

I'll take a picture and post it here in the next week or so. The swap out was not requested but whether a ultra fast port will be something that will be needed, and affordable, for my friend into the future is highly unlikely but you never know.

I myself come from the acoustic coupler days and yet today have a 550/75 service. That's good enough for me now!

Possibly wrong manufactuer ONT for the headend equip?

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Possibly wrong manufactuer ONT for the headend equip?

That would have been my guess too.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Possibly wrong manufactuer ONT for the headend equip?

Is this not supposed to conform to various standards?

In reply to a post by rippedcotton:

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Possibly wrong manufactuer ONT for the headend equip?

Is this not supposed to conform to various standards?

It was the case when Huawei and Nokia were the main equipment providers there was no problem at all with mixing the ONT and headend vendors, so Nokia ONT absolutely fine on a Huawei headend and vice versa, I doubt that anyone would take such a retrograde step in making necessary to have Adtran (for example) requiring their ONT to be used when on Adtran headends , for one thing that means the tech would have to ensure a stock of all vendors kit is available…lastly the OP said the service was working fine , and no improvement was provided by the switch of ONT’s , personally I’d think it was simply BS to cover the awkwardness of the apparently unnecessary and unexpected second and third appearances , perhaps the closing software scripts the tech completes had a statement along the lines of , ‘scan the ONT serial number to proceed’ before allowing the tech to book the task off .

All the ONT manufactures have their own proprietary functionality for testing so a matching ONT and OLT is optimal.

"old unit would have failed within a matter of days" is a common alternative to "I don't know what I'm talking about".

In reply to a post by PCJM40:

All the ONT manufactures have their own proprietary functionality for testing so a matching ONT and OLT is optimal.

Maybe so , but not in anyway necessary and certainly wouldn’t cause a catastrophic failure at a point in the near future,