XGS PON vs trad leased line reliability

Curious to hear thoughts on XGS PON vs trad DIA leased Line reliability for businesses.

For 10 years I've used Virgin and Optimity (via OR) 1GB leased lines and found them very stable. For the last 4+ years I've switched to using business specific alt net XGS PON 1GB connections at 3 sites and in general they feel less reliable even though they have leased line comparable SLA's. More random outages that last a few minutes, occasional long outages (fibre damage in the road), occasional low light levels etc. Some of these are not PON specific, but I wonder if in general the overhead of PON has an impact, along with the higher change that the fibre that we (and others) rely on is more prone to changes and interference due to the flux of customers.

Anyone have any experience or thoughts on this?

Edited by lifeofd (Fri 22-Aug-25 19:21:49)

Very basically (and self evidently) PON is a shared medium from the serving exchange/local cabinet/FeX. A DIA is a direct connection back to the local exchange/POP. It’s inherently more stable from an architectural perspective, even before equipment and the additional layers of service / fault repair come into play.

Saying that it perfectly possible to have a very stable, almost outage free FTTP service (dependant very much on the network provider & service provider). Openreach for example is considered to be a very stable network (ISP that run over their network are caveated), other networks perhaps less so, especially smaller and less ‘mature’ networks.

Ultimately if the highest level of stability is required then it has to be DIA. If you’re willing to trade-off price for ‘some’ stability then FTTP can be OK too.

…should have also added, it’s also a reality that there are some relatively poor DIA service providers out there.

Sounds like you have been fortunate in your experience, but there are some operators out there that aren’t as good. Caveat emptor.

For me from the perspective of the SMB market, the value of being able to save money by moving away from EAD and to broadband is that it frees up a huge amount of monthly spend that you can then put into adding resilience, overlay VPN for intra-site connectivity etc. so you can end up saving over two grand a year per site while also adding uptime and speeding things up.

If you rely on inbound connectivity to fixed IP addresses then solving that will open up so many more options for adding availability to your site.

Edited by jpm (Wed 27-Aug-25 09:33:06)

PON is shared infrastructure, including consumers. So I think its not going to get the same uptime as a dedicated circuit would. The difference on a business product would be priority on faults, compensation if terms are not met, and better access to support.

The difference you are seeing isn't necessarily down to technology: it could also be altnet versus long-established provider.

That is: skilled network operations team, proper monitoring systems, change control procedures, less slapdash approach and cutting of corners etc.

FWIW, I see very good reliability on my home Openreach GPON connection.

Another possibility is the shared physical infrastructure - with multiple providers and altnets constantly accessing the same ducts and footway boxes, there's more of a chance that someone will disturb or break someone else's connection.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

The difference you are seeing isn't necessarily down to technology: it could also be altnet versus long-established provider.

That is: skilled network operations team, proper monitoring systems, change control procedures, less slapdash approach and cutting of corners etc.

FWIW, I see very good reliability on my home Openreach GPON connection.

Another possibility is the shared physical infrastructure - with multiple providers and altnets constantly accessing the same ducts and footway boxes, there's more of a chance that someone will disturb or break someone else's connection.

I'm not sure it's about skills in altnets. Many of the engineers have run leased line selling businesses for a long time. It may be more about constant changes to the network, similar to your latter point. An EAD might use the same ducts though but there may be differences in that infrastructure is more dedicated/less shared. Also the termination is probably different and may require less maintenance due to less complexity.

I'm not saying *all* altnets are like that, but clearly some are. For example, I read that a well-known altnet recently stopped working on IPv6 for several weeks - it wasn't picked up by their own monitoring systems (if they have any at all), and they ignored customer reports.

Thanks for input all, I'm going to stick with XGSPON for the relatively large costs savings, especially for capacities such as 5Gbps and make sure there's some failover. Who knows, in a few years I may be back to more trad leased lines.

We've just completed a year on a CityFibre IDNet service having come from 11 years on an EAD. The only downtime we had with the CityFibre service was when they deregistered a bunch of Nokia ONTs and they fixed that in four hours. There's no difference in performance that would be attributed to the network rather than the ISP, except it's costing £50 instead of £380.

CityFibre are a lot harder work to deal with than Openreach, but once the service is installed that's irrelevant.

Edited by jpm (Fri 23-Jan-26 12:29:27)