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[#] Sat Mar 11 2023 21:46:25 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

Subject: Re: Hacking the Motorola or TelLabs ONT to provide hours of battery backup for DATA

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The sensible move would be to deregulate, at least as far as requirements that pertain to obsolete technologies.  In the era of mobile telephones, no one cares if the landline is still working in a power outage.  Telephone and cable companies (as if there would be a difference once both fully transition to fiber) want to retire all that copper wire.  The remaining "old" customers will eventually be moved to multitenant fiber terminals that serve a neighborhood or a building, and the big 1000-pair cables can finally come down.  My street has several of those since I live near a central office.  (Thankfully, my house is 250 feet from the street with a lot of trees in between, and my drops are partially underground, so I don't have to look at them.)

The truly sensible move would be to deregulate nearly everything, but governmentals need a reason to exist.  I'd prefer to have them doing things like forcing everyone to deploy IPv6 instead of forcing them to keep self-powered wireline services running.



[#] Sat Mar 11 2023 21:59:18 UTC from Nurb432

Subject: Re: Hacking the Motorola or TelLabs ONT to provide hours of battery backup for DATA

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at least you can rely on copper in most emergencies...

and you can run a small LED light off the line too, so you dont have to sit in the dark.

Sat Mar 11 2023 04:46:25 PM EST from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Hacking the Motorola or TelLabs ONT to provide hours of battery backup for DATA

 them to keep self-powered wireline services running.



 



[#] Mon Mar 13 2023 17:56:19 UTC from LadySerenaKitty

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The last time we had an actual copper-backed phone service was our house in Smithsburg, MD (2004-2008).  In 2008 we moved to Converse, TX and every place we've lived since has used a VoIP service for phones.  Converse was the only time we had fiber and it was AWESOME.  Since then, we've only had cable.  Currently, we have this weird 4-wire thing in an RJ-11 connector, somehow it's still AT&T U-verse like the fiber was, it's just not AT&T U-verse Fiber.  Ya, we lose landline phone service when the UPS fails after a long power failure.

We don't really care about losing the landline phone service, we really care about losing internet.  As long as we still have the webternetz during a prolonged power failure, we're good.  Remember the Big Freeze of 2021?  I do, I was there.  4 days of no power and 2 days of no water.  Had webternetz the entire time, so could charge phones and warm up in car.  We saw fuel delivery trucks at most of the nearby cell towers as the power grid was saying "fuck you I quit".

The minor freeze of 2022 was less bad.  Both of the freezes kinda hit my UPS battery hard, it needs a new one.



[#] Tue Mar 14 2023 23:27:12 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Ooooh, you've got the "old" U-Verse, which is fiber to the neighborhood and then VDSL to each home in the neighborhood. It maxes out at a couple of Mbps, right? Eventually they're going to need to expand the fiber network to reach every home. It seems that fiber, specifically PON, has finally "won". Ten years from now, copper will be a thing of the past, and there won't really be any difference between a "phone company" and a "cable company".

I've gotta give some credit to AT&T though -- they do the toxic video feed ("cable") using multicast instead of an RFoG overlay. They did it right.

[#] Wed Mar 15 2023 04:33:19 UTC from LadySerenaKitty

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Really would like the U-verse Fiber we had in that brand-new development we lived at in Converse.

Ya, the connection here is 170Mbit, yet for whatever reason no TCP stream ever goes over 10MB/s (yes, bytes).  At least with Crapcast in Maryland, I could hit some truly spectacular download speeds from Steam - peak was 250MB/s, and Steam only uses a single TCP stream for each game download. :drool:

Tue Mar 14 2023 19:27:12 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar
Ooooh, you've got the "old" U-Verse, which is fiber to the neighborhood and then VDSL to each home in the neighborhood. It maxes out at a couple of Mbps, right? Eventually they're going to need to expand the fiber network to reach every home. It seems that fiber, specifically PON, has finally "won". Ten years from now, copper will be a thing of the past, and there won't really be any difference between a "phone company" and a "cable company".

I've gotta give some credit to AT&T though -- they do the toxic video feed ("cable") using multicast instead of an RFoG overlay. They did it right.

 



[#] Fri Mar 31 2023 18:52:53 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Really would like the U-verse Fiber we had in that brand-new development we lived at in Converse.

Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, you ought to be getting decent service in the not too distant future.

It has become apparent to me lately that the broadband wars have ended, and PON has won.  Every provider has either deployed PON or is getting ready to deploy it.  Even the legacy "cable companies" are finally starting to get on the bandwagon, because coaxial cable has reached its limit.  Maybe they could squeeze more out of it by going above 1 GHz, but that would break so much existing infrastructure that the cost of upgrading it would approach the cost of just moving to fiber.  DSL maxes out at a few hundred Mbps if you use two pairs and are within a stone's throw of the hut.

The trend towards all-fiber networks, like many other trends, was accelerated by the bogeyman that sent everyone home in 2020 and turned our homes into offices and classrooms.  Massive use of two-way video, combined with homes full of bandwidth-hungry devices gobbling down streaming services, created even more demand for bandwidth.

The above graph (Data from OECD; graph by Stephen Shankland/CNET) shows the trend away from copper and towards fiber in 38 developed nations.  (Ironically it begins in 2009, the year I first had it, hehe.)  Fiber is the clear winner and is here to stay.  The beauty of PON is that there is no active equipment in the distribution network, only fiber optic cable and passive fiber splitters.  This makes it future-proof.  Consider the Verizon FiOS plant: they upgraded from BPON to GPON and is now upgrading its entire footprint to NG-PON2 without replacing any equipment in the streets.  Moreover, different generations of PON can coexist on the same glass if they are using different wavelengths.

The equipment is getting so small and so cheap that it's going everywhere.  Even some tiny municipal fiber providers are popping up.  Optical line terminals are now down to the size of a 1U pizza box if you are only serving a few hundred subscribers from a particular point of presence.  Optical network terminals have been compressed into an SFP module!  And the fiber itself is now cheaper than copper, since it's made from the two most abundant elements in the Earth's crust (oxygen and silicon).

So here's what we can expect:  everything will go to PON over the next decade, sub-1Gbps speeds will be considered as outdated as dialup, and eventually there won't be any such thing as a phone company or a cable company because they're all delivering IP over PON.



[#] Fri Mar 31 2023 19:12:57 UTC from Nurb432

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Until the greenies figure it out..

Fri Mar 31 2023 02:52:53 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

  And the fiber itself is now cheaper than copper, since it's made from the two most abundant elements in the Earth's crust (oxygen and silicon).

 



[#] Thu Apr 06 2023 22:05:30 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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I doubt they'll object to the fiber core itself, since it's made from abundant elements. They'd be more likely to complain about the outer jacket, which is made in part with petroleum, and the energy required to manufacture it, which brings about the end of the world when not powered by unicorn flatulence.

Really though, fiber is so much easier on the environment than copper is, that it would be difficult to complain. Anyone who did would have to take a totally Luddite approach of wanting to not have the Internet or any other telecom at all.

Can I just say it again ... I really, really, really like the fact that PON is rapidly becoming the dominant last-mile technology (for wireline services, at least), displacing twisted-pair and coaxial cable. It really is ideal as a distribution network. No powered repeaters, highly multiplexed and bidirectional, and you can even split it multiple times as long as the light is strong enough at the end of the line.

The fact that small fiber ISP's are now sprouting up is a testament to how awesome this is. There's one called Simple Fiber in the eastern part of Maryland (USA) that was basically built in the style of a "mom & pop ISP". They leased space in a few locations for POPs and some right-of-way along fiber paths, and they sell services directly to business and residential customers. One of their tech leads has a youtube channel that shows day-to-day maintenance of the network.

It's pretty cool how flexible the service is. They generally use pizza box size OLT's in their POPs since they don't seem to centralize in big central offices. Sometimes a port will be split two or three times depending on the customer. For example, if there are a bunch of customers in a single building, they'll just drop a splitter directly in the building. As long as the light levels are high enough, and the maximum number of subscribers on an OLT port is not exceeded, everything just works.

Sometimes I stand in my garage and look at the equipment just to keep marveling at how cool it is. Yes I am a nerd.

[#] Tue Apr 11 2023 15:53:12 UTC from darknetuser

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Can I just say it again ... I really, really, really like the fact
that PON is rapidly becoming the dominant last-mile technology (for
wireline services, at least), displacing twisted-pair and coaxial
cable. It really is ideal as a distribution network. No powered
repeaters, highly multiplexed and bidirectional, and you can even split

it multiple times as long as the light is strong enough at the end of

the line.

The main worry I have with things like GPON is that, by design, a faulty or evil SPF module in a subscriber's premise may introduce drifting window errors and interfere with other users of the OTL.

[#] Fri Apr 14 2023 17:51:06 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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That is technically true, although I've never seen it happen in the nearly 14 years I have had the service. I can definitely see how that failure mode is possible, since it requires the terminal to behave properly on the wavelength.

In practice, though? In the extremely rare case that it did happen, the provider would act pretty quickly to avoid collateral damage to other subscribers, and if you messed with it on purpose you'd get kicked off their PON right away. Maybe it's different in your part of the world; I'd be willing to hear about that.

From where I sit, though, PON is just so much faster and so much more reliable than HFC or DSL that it isn't even a contest.

[#] Sat Apr 15 2023 13:51:38 UTC from darknetuser

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2023-04-14 13:51 from IGnatius T Foobar
That is technically true, although I've never seen it happen in the

nearly 14 years I have had the service. I can definitely see how that

failure mode is possible, since it requires the terminal to behave

properly on the wavelength.

In practice, though? In the extremely rare case that it did happen,

the provider would act pretty quickly to avoid collateral damage to

other subscribers, and if you messed with it on purpose you'd get

kicked off their PON right away. Maybe it's different in your part of

the world; I'd be willing to hear about that.

From where I sit, though, PON is just so much faster and so much more

reliable than HFC or DSL that it isn't even a contest.



I guess the reason why you don't see it often is because consumers are sheep who use their ISP provided ONT+Routing unit. It is not like there are thousands of darknetusers using their own equipment instead of the ISP one because the ISP One is not capable of pushing enough packets per second forward as the fibre line behind it :P


If there was enough people ditching their ISP equipment and rolling their own, even if well intentioned, we would see a good number of incidents based on statistics alone.

In my neck of the woods, most incidents (in domestic or small business networks) come from outright ISP missmanagement. Like pushing firmware upgrades tofirms' routers that void the fucking firewall table and LET ALL THE INTERNAL NETWORK OF THE CUSTOMER ACCESIBLE OVER IPV6 ADDRESSES, EXCEPT WHEN DARKNETUSER HAD SET A SECOND FIREWALL BEHIND THE ISP ROUTER BECAUSE DARKNETUSER IS A PARANOID MOTHERFUCKER AND NOBODY WILL EVER THANK HIM FOR IT.

[#] Sat Apr 15 2023 18:23:47 UTC from LadySerenaKitty

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So, you have AT&T, the company that believes IPv6 can't be firewalled?

Sat Apr 15 2023 09:51:38 EDT from darknetuser
In my neck of the woods, most incidents (in domestic or small business networks) come from outright ISP missmanagement. Like pushing firmware upgrades tofirms' routers that void the fucking firewall table and LET ALL THE INTERNAL NETWORK OF THE CUSTOMER ACCESIBLE OVER IPV6 ADDRESSES, EXCEPT WHEN DARKNETUSER HAD SET A SECOND FIREWALL BEHIND THE ISP ROUTER BECAUSE DARKNETUSER IS A PARANOID MOTHERFUCKER AND NOBODY WILL EVER THANK HIM FOR IT.

 



[#] Sat Apr 15 2023 21:03:29 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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First of all it's not AT&T; it's "at&t", also known as SBC. Ask any one of the thousands of people left behind in the wake of that disaster and they'll make sure you know the difference.

I've never heard of anyone using Verizon FiOS with their own ONT. I would love that. I would buy the ONT that is squeezed into an SFP+ form factor and stick it right into my own router.

I guess the newer ONTs have built-in routing and wifi, like the cable people do? In that case the common practice (as I'm sure you are aware) is to tell the provider "please put it in bridge mode" and you put your own router behind it.

Still waiting for IPv6 over here though.

[#] Sat Apr 15 2023 23:28:54 UTC from Nurb432

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Im a bell-baby myself.  

Mother was a LD operator 60s-80s, the breakup was horrendous, and i still think uncalled for. Regulations were so tight they could not sneeze without getting a fine.

Sat Apr 15 2023 05:03:29 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

First of all it's not AT&T; it's "at&t", also known as SBC. Ask any one of the thousands of people left behind in the wake of that disaster and they'll make sure you know the difference.


 



[#] Sun Apr 16 2023 00:32:12 UTC from darknetuser

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I guess the newer ONTs have built-in routing and wifi, like the cable

people do? In that case the common practice (as I'm sure you are
aware) is to tell the provider "please put it in bridge mode" and you

put your own router behind it.

Consumer grade subscriptions usually come with an ONT+Router unit which includes everything in the same box. You can set most of those to act as bridge modes but not all ISP do it. The other issue is that even if they do, the ONT+Router is a much bigger brick than a simple ONT unit. If you plan to use a 300 bucks router you will curse that damn brick for the ammount of space it takes in the networking rack.

A small firm subscription is different because they will send you some low to mid end Cisco gear, so a) the need to provide your own gear decreases and b) bridge mode is available if you really need it.

[#] Mon Apr 17 2023 03:53:36 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Consumer grade subscriptions usually come with an ONT+Router unit which includes everything in the same box. You can set most of those to act as bridge modes but not all ISP do it. The other issue is that even if they do, the ONT+Router is a much bigger brick than a simple ONT unit. If you plan to use a 300 bucks router you will curse that damn brick for the ammount of space it takes in the networking rack.

Heh.  My ONT is enormous, and it doesn't even have the ability to do routing.  Here's a photo:

(I opened the doors so you can see inside.)

The top half is a battery backup unit, which used to be a requirement back when the telephone service had stricter regulations.  It had to maintain dial tone for eight hours, and would sacrifice data and video to do so.  That didn't make sense for me, so as you can see I jumpered out the signal pins so it would keep the data service online for as long as the battery lasted.  You can also see that I tapped into the +12VDC to supply battery backed power to my router and a wireless access point.

The whole bottom half is the ONT.  It does 1 Gbps data, two phone lines, and RFoG video.  I only have the data service.  They do have smaller ONTs now, but I've got plenty of space on the network wall so I'll keep this one for as long as it keeps working.



[#] Mon Apr 17 2023 11:31:02 UTC from Nurb432

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You dont want to see my closet.. :)



[#] Tue Apr 18 2023 05:46:49 UTC from test2

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no closet, but i do use moca. 2.5gbps.



[#] Tue Apr 18 2023 11:20:35 UTC from Nurb432

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Mine is a literal closet. Its where my water heater also is.

Tue Apr 18 2023 01:46:49 AM EDT from test2

no closet, but i do use moca. 2.5gbps.



 



[#] Wed Apr 19 2023 16:00:21 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

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Mine is a literal closet. Its where my water heater also is.

Mine is a wall. A big, beautiful wall. :)

Actually it's a piece of plywood that someone put up on the wall back when it was a rental property. I have no idea what they were using it for ... maybe hanging up tools or something. There was no wiring at all in that area.
When I moved in I had Verizon bring the fiber to that location and put the ONT up on the board, and over the first few years we lived here I gradually updated all the wiring in the house and brought it there.

It's so neat and tidy now that I occasionally walk into the room and just look at it for a little while. Because I am a nerd.

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