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Openreach FTTP Network monitoring

Flagrag

Pro Member
I was just wondering how deep can Openreach delve into their FTTP to look at network utilisation?

Are they able to monitor individual connections, how much is going through each CBT,PON and aggregation node in know this equipment has no electricity supply but wasn’t sure if could monitor things anyway.
 
At an engineering level they can monitor the OLT port, the fibre out to the splitter (CBT) and on to the connected ONT's, including rogue ONTs etc.

At a database level they have defined design practices, their policies and what product types and numbers that are present. They will have loading rules in their process.

What is made available outside OR engineering is another issue.

Their main task is to maintain the product sold to the ISP with the aggregation node and CBT providing them flexibility. i.e if a splitter is overloaded, they can light another fibre and add an additional CBT and distribute load if necessary.
 
They’ll have physical utilisation stats of all CBT ports, splitter capacity etc. for the passive side of the infrastructure.

They also can actively monitor the network utilisation on a particular PON (OLT port level) and the various VLANs running over it - pipes within pipes so to speak.

Security is integrated into the management fabric of the overall OLT estate including authorisation of individual ONT/subscribers to participate on the PON in the first instance and their allocation of resource / bandwidth in both directions. It’s all very strictly controlled.
 
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Thanks Meatball- That is what I was trying to understand how they monitor the traffic over a specific splitter or CBT to then make decisions on whether to add additional fibres or equipment.

I remember the engineers doing the work round me saying it was all passive but the network operations team could see real time data how much capacity was being used
 
Thinking about it (and without any knowledge of the equipment involved) FTTP is a bit like a mobile phone network. In both directions, for a group of users, the resource (the shared exchange optical node) and onward capacity is shared amongst the users (each with their ONT) as the system architecture defines.

Each user "requests" capacity (upstream) from the exchange node or is allocated capacity "downstream" at the exchange node and that (at the simplest level) is what the infrastructure provider knows about the utilisation for each user.

There will be a contracted upstream and downstream maximum (the speed of the service) so that will be the upper limit of what will be allocated to each user.

If, at a time, the pool of users is requesting capacity in excess of what can be provided an allocation process will limit what each user can have and the "contention" in the system starts to be visible.

Currently (for the higher bandwidth services at least) I guess that contention on the optical level in the link to the premises is rarely an issue as all users on an exchange optical port would need to be requesting bandwidth in excess of the total available.

There may well be further limitations (and contention) elsewhere in the system for each ISP on the platform.

Designing a platform such as this, each piece of equipment will make data available to be gathered and processed, the challenge is to process the massive amount of raw data to get something useful for billing, network health monitoring and general support without overwhelming those operating the network.

Also with multiple parties involved in the system, it is very important for each party to be able to prove that "my part of the system is working withing the agreed service level" when it comes to the "it's not working" bunfight!
 
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