I need a sanity check.
An incumbent in Canada has revealed that its voice service on FTTP
deployments is based on H.248 MEGACO (Media Gateway Controller).
Are there any examples of CLEC access to such FTTP deployments ?
(for instance, an area where the copper was removed, leaving only fibre
to homes, do CLECs retain competitive access via fibre to homes, or is
it going out of business or going with pure SIP/VoIP over the regular
internet connection, instead of using the "quality" voice link in the
GPON with garanteed bandwidth ?
Can this protocol support the programming of one OLT/MG connecting to
the Telco's MGC, while the OLT/MG next door connects to the CLEC's MGC ?
Or does the protocol result in MG's "discovering" the nearest MGC and
connecting to it (making it hard to have multiple MGCs from competing
telcos).
I have been lead to believe that most OLTs came with a SIP based ATA. It
appears that H.248 is more telco friendly and scales better. Does this
mean that H.248 is more widely deployed in FTTH ?
In my experience, where Bell Canada has installed FTTP facilities, CLECs are not given access to these deployments.
The orders come back as "UNAVAILABLE FACILITIES"
We use H.248 in our CLEC area. The voice service for that ONT runs on a
specified VLAN for that ONT, so if we had to share our infrastructure with
other CLECs we could do that.
Frank
+1 here we do the same exact thing with our ftth and ont¹s separate vlan
with h.248 gw¹s sitting on it and you just point the profile of the voice
port to the gw. There is a reason why they are doing things this way, as
current regulation does not force them to give you access to there fiber
network.
Carlos Alcantar
Race Communications / Race Team Member
1325 Howard Ave. #604, Burlingame, CA. 94010
Phone: +1 415 376 3314 / carlos@race.com / http://www.race.com
Based on asnwers so far:
To put things in perspective
The current regulations offer unbundled COPPER loops, as well as an
aggregated wholesale last mile access for DSL/VDSL (wholesale also
mandated for cable for data but not voice)
This may change with the CRTC 2013-551 consultation which reviews a
whole bunch of stuff on "essential services" nature, and this includes
discussion on whether wholesale access to FTTH served homes should be
mandated.
As a result, knowing if the architecture of H.248 allows multiple voice
service providers to co-exist on the same GPON (one house connected to
ILEC voice, the next house connected to CLEC etc) becomes important.
If the protocol is such that it does not permit co-existance, then a
debate on wholesale voice access is moot. If the protocol does permit
it, then providing soe form of evidence (either existing implementations
or pointer to specs that show this was explicitely designed into the
architecture) would be of great help.
We currently use MGCP on our ONTs. The configuration file is downloaded at boot, and contains the IP address of the our switch.
In theory, the IP address could be set in the configuration file to point to a different service provider on a per ONT basis.
Unbundling of FTTH access is still going to be painful. I would suspect the ILEC would demand that their ONT be used. This could lead to interop issues.
If I were asking for unbundled FTTH, I'd probably want to run my own OLT, and have my own (or ILEC supplied, but designated) splitter in the ILEC cabinet. I would then lease feeder fibre from a POI to the splitter cabinet, then fibre subloops to the customer.
The problem becomes that if too many competitors want access to the same cabinet, there is the possibility that there may not be enough room or feeder fibres.
It would probably be simplest to allow the operator to run the physical network and provide the CLEC's access to service provisioning on that network.
Thanks,
Joe McLeod
MUS FiberNET www.musfiber.com
919 Jarnigan Avenue, Morristown TN 37815
O: 423-317-6276
jmcleod@musfiber.net