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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

The most surprising details was [1] from init7.

>Compatibility requirements There is no obligation on you to procure the hardware through us, and the hardware shown here is not the only possible hardware for you to use. There are also other compatible products, as long as the requisite «bi-di» fibre optic technology conforms to the following specifications (recommended: Flexoptix, more router information):

No Modem / ONT. Just a Router with compatible SFP optic. I wish more ISP do that. And not force me to use your crappy ONT or Wifi Router. They could of course go another router and provide actual decent ONT or WiFi Router. But the chance of happening, or they care about quality is slim.

[1] https://www.init7.net/en/internet/hardware/

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A lot of fibre is GPON (a type of PON, passive optical network), a scheme where each customer receives data from multiple other customers as well as their own data, so it would be very insecure for them to allow customers to use their own ONT. If you can get AON (active optical networking), then likely they will allow BYO ONT. Note that AON requires more hardware that is more expensive on the ISP side.

I know there are lots of GPON Network that allows you to use your own ONT, and I think that is even by law in Germany where you could log in with username and password just like DSL. I know in GPON they are all shared but I never thought about the security aspect of it, so thanks for pointing that out I will dig a little bit deeper in to the subject.

Isn't the downstream traffic in GPON encrypted?!

I just looked that up, and you seem to be correct indeed, AES-128 is used.

In https://twitter.com/kuenzler/status/1397814747379154944 (German), Fredy Künzler from init7 talks about PON and why init7 is opposed to it.

He makes the calculation that from the ≈3000 CHF needed to connect a location with fiber, only 50 CHF difference come down to PON or AON. The advantage of dedicated lines (for all ISPs, too!) overweighs the financial savings in his reasoning.

That is a surprisingly small difference, although when you are building a greenfield last-mile fiber network for an entire country that small difference probably adds up to millions, which is probably why we got GPON in Australia.

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