Anyone else doing it? Do you like your gear?
Ms. Lady Benjamin PD Cannon, ASCE
6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC
CEO
ben@6by7.net
"The only fully end-to-end encrypted global telecommunications company in the world.”
FCC License KJ6FJJ
Copper 2.5 Gbps Multi-gig uplinks on Wifi 6 gateways are coming out in 2021 from most vendors.
I am using XGS PON in trials and have been impressed with the speed and cost.
Steven
Pretty much this. XGS-PON seems to be "here now" and the costs on both the CO and CPE side have gotten down to where it's probably worth going straight to it (skipping GPON) in new deployments unless you think you can get away with just GPON for 5+ years. I'm not sure if it's worth overlaying existing GPON deployments yet, but we're getting close, and offering "multi-gig" is, while still not very useful from a practical point of view for most customers, a potential marketing advantage.
I've been only recommending GPON for new, greenfield deployments in rural situations where expected speeds are low to begin with, density is low, and there may be a desire to push the optical link budget as it is a bit better than typical XGS-PON systems. That's been the case for about a year, now.
Customer facing routers are not quite there, yet. I think Asus has one, but I've seen mixed reviews. And what's out now is still limited to 2.5GBASE-T and often only on the WAN port (LAN ports are still 1000BASE-T) meaning in practice customers can't get any more than gigabit speeds to a single endpoint (not that many endpoints can keep up, anyway) for that all-important speed test.
One of my router vendors has been teasing me with a "true 10Gb" router due out 1Q 2021. I've been told to expect NBASE-T (1G, 2.5G, 5G, 10G) on both WAN and all LAN ports + 802.11ax "Wifi 6" with at least 5Gbps of real-world IPv4 throughput with NAT and essentially wire-speed IPv6 without NAT or content inspection at a realistic price point. I'll be interested to see what they actually deliver as that would make future-looking multi-gig deployments actually meaningful.
Of course, you can replace XGS-PON with 10G-EPON if that's your preference. I actually kinda prefer the IEEE versions, but most of my vendors concentrate on the ITU/Bellcore stuff in North America, so GPON/XGS-PON it is.
So here in New Zealand 2/2Gbs & 4/4Gbs XGS-PON has just been rolled out in conjunction with the existing GPON rollout (Currently 79% of the country). CPE is definitely an issue and the most popular way of dealing with it is to use the Nokia XS-250WX-A ONT as the RGW as well. Permissions on the ONT are a little bit of an issue right now but this is being actively worked on and should be sorted in the coming few months. The ONT provides one 10GBASET and 4 gig ports as well as 4x4AC wifi. Realistically I have found using a multigig switch is very much the way to go (Mikrotik CRS312-4C+8XG-RM in my case) as then you can use 2.5GBASET and 5GBASET to clients. 2.5G seems to work fine on any ratty old cat5E you already have and USB3 dongles can be had for $25 or so. 10GBASET is real picky on cabling and I have found that 2.5G and 5G work much better if you are not doing a complete re-cable of the site.
Stand alone RGW's are hard to find, I'd be interested to hear if people have found anything smaller than the Mikrotik RB4011 or CCR's as well. People are using the Unify Pro's but they really don't perform at 4gig. Obviously wifi is not going to benefit much from XGSPON, but even then having that massive upload available is very nice. The biggest issue with these speeds as an ISP is trying to train the customers that the home setup that they have spent a bunch of money on is unlikely to give them pretty 4Gb/s speed tests as there are bottlenecks all over their personal devices.
Here is the result of using the Nokia ONT and the Mikrotik Switch - Speedtest by Ookla - The Global Broadband Speed Test of note, only my 10G connected Linux server does this, all the various other devices struggle to "speedtest" faster than 2-3 gig, even the high end devices.
For the home, if you're looking at shipping 10Gbps-based CPE's for under US$200, I can't think of anything other than the Tik:
https://mikrotik.com/product/rb4011igs_rm
They claim:
\- 2\.6Gbps forwarding for 64\-byte packets\.
\- 7\.8Gbps forwarding for 512\-byte packets\.
\- 9\.7Gbps forwarding for 1,518\-byte packets\.
Mark.
Funny, that's the very unit I recommended as well in my previous post to Brandon :-).
As reasonably-priced devices that will have half decent working code go (for 10Gbps, no less), it's hard to beat the Tik.
I'd still never use them in production, but for home CPE's, you bet I would.
Mark.
For the home, if you're looking at shipping 10Gbps-based CPE's for under
US$200, I can't think of anything other than the Tik:https://mikrotik.com/product/rb4011igs_rm
That has 1 10g port. How can that be a 10g CPE?
They claim:
\- 2\.6Gbps forwarding for 64\-byte packets\. \- 7\.8Gbps forwarding for 512\-byte packets\. \- 9\.7Gbps forwarding for 1,518\-byte packets\.
so, not 10g 
Add in some services and I bet it goes down from there.
The bigger question in all this if you're doing 10g to the residential user,
what are they going to use for their home router/NAT device? Even 60 ghz wifi
routers top out at like 5 gbit/s, and NAT at this speed means a powerful CPU.
10g to the home is a great idea to think about, it's just not terribly
practical for most customers unless they want to drop 1-2k on routing gear and
nics. This is always changing, but it's going to be a few years until we
reach the right performance and price point.
Just because nobody is mentioning it - you can always build a pfSense/VyOS/Vyatta box in whatever form factor you’d prefer. Even can run within a VM if you really want to.
Regards,
Cory
That has 1 10g port. How can that be a 10g CPE?
Realistically, what are you going to be running at 1.01Gbps inside your home at any given point?
Yes, this may or may not be a rhetorical question.
so, not 10g
Show me a single production-level 10Gbps port that runs at 10Gbps :-).
Add in some services and I bet it goes down from there.
Yes, those are just plain old IP routing numbers.
Add IPSec and QoS, the numbers fall to between 20% - 40% of that.
The bigger question in all this if you're doing 10g to the residential user,
what are they going to use for their home router/NAT device? Even 60 ghz wifi
routers top out at like 5 gbit/s, and NAT at this speed means a powerful CPU.10g to the home is a great idea to think about, it's just not terribly
practical for most customers unless they want to drop 1-2k on routing gear and
nics. This is always changing, but it's going to be a few years until we
reach the right performance and price point.
Well, the initial question is what is going to drive that kind of capacity in a home setting?
Unless you are providing some kind of service at some kind of scale, I just don't see homes blowing through 10Gbps, never mind 1Gbps.
I just bumped my FTTH service up from 100Mbps to 200Mbps, and aside from faster Youtube uploads for my DJ sets, I'm struggling to fill it :-).
I have a mate up the road who just paid for a 1Gbps FTTH service because it was the same price as a 100Mbps one. He generally lives between 900Kbps and 20Mbps.
Gigabit-level FTTH services for the home, I feel, have always been about marketing ploys from providers, because they know there is no practical way users can ever hit those figures from their homes. But because users want to "feel good" and "brag" about their Gigabit home connectivity, they'll pay for it. Heck, if I were a consumer ISP, I'd do it too :-).
Mark.
It would meet some customers’ needs because multiple people could use 1G of service at a time. I think it is interesting to distinguish “>1G CPE” from “true 10G CPE” and I suspect many / most customers are looking for the former.
For a CPE, openwrt would also work well. It runs well on a PC-type platform.
My point was the gear is not there yet for the non-technical people. Anyone
can roll their own router for cheap, but that's a science experiment. It's
akin to a WISP in 1998 running karlnet on a pc with wi-lan cards. Sure you
can do it, but there's no one to support it.
Think more using your PON network to also serve commercial customers so you don't need high end CPE to hit 1-5Gbps or WDM setups.
And that is saying much...
Most TV's, the PS4, the Apple TV, e.t.c., still run at 100Mbps max., offering plenty of 4K services.
There clearly is no legitimate use-case for Joe and Jane at their home re: 10Gbps.
Mark.
Not exactly "home" friendly :-).
Mark.
Large upstream capacity has always been about aggregation of the downstream. The 100Gbps or 400Gbps backbones we deploy, as operators, are not symmetrical with what our customers buy. Mark.
This already happens today, because sales folk want to close deals. Whether PON actually works for an Enterprise customer is not their problem.
Mark.
Haven't tested it myself, but the 10GE residential provider here in Sweden is using some kind of Huawei HGW that typically is used for XGPON but has had its WAN MAC swapped out for 10GBASE-LR use.
You can run it through google translate. Do note that this "news" is from October 2018.
Can I ask a really dumb question? Consider it an xmas present. I know this sounds like "nobody needs more than 640k", but how can household possibly need a gig let alone 10g? I'm still on 25mbs DSL, have cut the cord so all tv, etc is over the net. If I really cared and wanted 4k I could probably upgrade to a 50mbs service and be fine. Admittedly it's just the two of us here, but throw in a couple of kids and I still don't see how ~100mbs isn't sufficient let alone 1 or 10G. Am I missing something really stupid?
Mike