I’ve been mildly dissatisfied with my ISP and my home network setup for quite a while now, but it so far hasn’t pushed past my threshold to merit addressing. But the situation isn’t static. Alternatives have improved, the quality of service has degraded, the cost has increased, and I was planning on overhauling the situation for a coming move anyway.
My current setup is what you would call the ISP’s Default Offering. You get an All-in-One box that does Access, Switching, Routing, and Wireless. I do like the simplicity of it, so long as it ticks all the boxes. And my boxes are as follows:
- All desktops are to be connected via Ethernet cable, for bandwidth purposes.
- Whatever method is used for the living room, it must suffice for HD streaming.
- No rented equipment. Loaned is fine.
At first, the ISP did not charge for the ISP-provided box. Over time, their policy changed and they started charging a small monthly amount for the box. This wouldn’t bother me so much so long as I had the option to buy my own equipment and replace the ISP-provided one. But the Telecom regulator where I live is, if we’re being charitable, weak and ineffectual on these matters. And so, my options for ditching the ISP’s equipment and using my own are up to the ISP.
The market here (and the bill) is split into Infrastructure Providers and Internet Service Providers. The former build out the actual physical infrastructure, last-mile deployments and the like. The latter manage your, well, Internet Service, supporting connections via one or more Infrastructure Providers. I think of them sort of like MVNOs.
The access technologies supported by the infrastructure providers determine the sort of equipment you’d need to own be able to connect. Because the regulation here is weak, there’s no standardization of what the providers must let you do with your own equipment. So some infrastructure providers let you connect from a set of supported aftermarket products if you wish, but others don’t support that at all.
As Fiber-to-the-Home technologies have been steadily eating into the marketshare of the older VDSL and DOCSIS based offerings, I went to investigate what options I might have as a consumer wanting to transition to connection via Fiber using privately-owned equipment. Up to some outliers or legacy installations, I understood that the market’s offerings are overwhelmingly based on PON.
One of the infrastructure providers here publishes a list of products it supports. Instructively, the list contains an “Equipment Type” column, which subdivides the offerings into three categories: “SFP ONT”, “BRIDGE ONT”, and “CPE GW ONT”.
So far, my interactions with network equipment never forced me to understand
what SFP is.
Now was the time. At first, I thought this was just “ports for fiber cables”,
directly analogous to RJ45 Ethernet connectors. Not so. Apparently, SFP ports
are meant for you to stick a transceiver for doing the low-level communication
in the technology of your choice, be it Ethernet or Fiber. Lobste.rs user fanf
refers us to MAUs,
considering SFP to be a modern iteration of that.
So, PON fits into this story as a possible technology for you to stick a corresponding transceiver into an SFP cage. Now we can understand the three categories above: “SFP ONT” means just a PON transceiver, a “modem on a stick”. Stick a supported one into an SFP port and you’re set. “BRIDGE ONT” products are media converter boxes, functioning as network bridges between a port that has a hard-wired PON transceiver, and (usually) an RJ45 Ethernet port. Lastly, “CPE GW ONT” products are All-in-One boxes, which function as routers and have a hard-wired PON port for WAN.
On to requirements. I want the equipment I purchase to last a long time. The setting is residential, without a fancy home lab – just consumer electronics. As far as access technology is concerned, it seems to me that any small home/office router with an SFP+ port (10Gbit/s) will suffice. It would be an advantage for the other ports to be Ethernet, as that’s what I will end up connecting consumer electronics to, and spending extra on SFP Ethernet transceivers seems wasteful. I would also like the cooling to be passive to reduce noise and have less moving parts.
For the SFP+ port I will likely need to get a transceiver supported by the Infrastructure Provider. All the supported ones right now are 1-2.4Gbit GPON, but there are indications that there will be deployments of XGS-PON (10Gbit) coming soon, so I wonder when they will publish which XGS-PON transceivers they support so I could skip buying a GPON transceiver. There’s an entire website devoted to these little devices, which may come in handy for making a selection: Hack GPON.
So far, for the Integrated-WiFi alternative, the MikroTik RB4011iGS Router caught my eye. For the WiFi-via-APs alternative, the MikroTik RB5009UPr Router caught my eye. Both have one SFP+ port, passive cooling, and a generous amount of Ethernet ports. For the latter, there’s one 2.5G Ethernet port, and the Ethernet ports support PoE-out, which is nice for the APs.
For wireless connections, if the router doesn’t directly support WiFi, it might be nice to connect access points via PoE, simplifying cabling. So in that case the router would need to support PoE-out while the access point would need to support PoE-in. I will also prefer picking access points supporting newer WiFi standards over older ones. I’m yet to settle on anything in particular, but it looks like MicroTik has many compact and unobtrusive offerings.