It's been about two years since I started submitting the requests to Telus to install fibre in my neighbourhood. I'd been disappointed to see that we were 300m outside of Telus' 2018 planned installation area. I had a local Lecdor contractor approach me around April of this year, and we began the process with the Strata.
After a few months, meetings, and onsite inspections the installation was completed last week. (Be prepared for confusion when dates and fibre pulls will happen, this was *VERY* poorly communicated and resulted in the fibre pull techs being here for a week instead of the planned '3 days.' In their defence, our 12-year-old conduits were poorly installed by a sub-contractor with 90 degree bends in them.)
I was able to request an install right away on the Thursday. I'd read all the reports and I'd seen the (terrible) install done at my neighbour's condo.
The Telus technician showed up on time, and began to unbox the ONT hardware that was aptly described in sizing as "a frozen package of grocery store lasagne for a family of four." As well as the router I sure as heck wasn't going to use after he left.
I said to him, "I wish you guys had an SFP for this instead of that massive ONT. "
My jaw hit the floor when he said, "I have one in my Truck! It plugs into the back of one of our newer, advanced modems." He took one look in my front hall closet (where the demarc is) and said, "You won't have a problem with this." I happen to have a Cisco SG300-10 which has two SFP ports in it. (I recall purchasing this switch years ago thinking, "I'll never use fibre or SFP's.")
He installed the SFP into the Telus modem, did his diagnostics, to prove that the connection worked, and his benchmark tools got about 300Mbps consistently. I then plugged it into the SFP port on the Cisco switch and had to do some network re-jigging as my current firewall; the Ubiquiti ER-X only has copper.
[For those that care. I set up a private, isolated, VLAN from the SFP port to another port that I then plugged the EdgeRouter into, a quick temporary fix. Which then connects back into the switch. Kludgy but it will suffice until an ER-4 is available.]
I re-ran the benchmarks, after making sure I'd enabled hardware offload on the ER-X. 330Mbps both ways, a 10% performance increase over the Telus Router! (Likely QoS, see disclaimer below)
Things I learned:
1) I don't think you can just run out to fs.com and buy your own SFP to GPON converter ($150 Canadian BTW), the one I received is from Nokia. He had to scan a QRcode on it and register it for the Head Office OLT to use it. (That's what the tech said, but if someone knows differently, please chime in!)
2) SFP isn't available on all networks he said, only recent installs. (I may have misunderstood from what he might have meant was, "It's only recently available.")
3) He recommended, and I agreed, to keep the router (not the 'frozen lasagne' ONT) for "testing, diagnostic and 'proof' for troubleshooting in the future." It's in the box, on a shelf.
4) the OLT SFP package said, "GPON ONT SFP (G-010S-A)"
5) There are a lot of new acronyms when researching Fibre, I knew nothing about this until a month ago, acronym mistakes may have been made in this post.
6) Bad splices are frequent, he had to re-splice the one in my maintenance room after re-doing the one in my condo 3 times.
As full disclosure, I will *ONLY* use this connection for Internet, I will not (at least for a while) use this for phone or TV. That will require some very special firewall configurations as well as make my internet run slower when the TV is on!
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