ONT Receive Power versus Fiber Length
How Adtran, Calix, and Ubiquiti Compare
At Preseem, we collect a lot of data from ISP access networks to help operators move from reactive to proactive operations and make their teams more efficient. On the fixed wireless side, we publish our yearly Fixed Wireless Network Report, which leverages this data to provide an overview of the FWA industry and equipment performance.
For fiber ISPs, we’ve begun actively analyzing our data to compare performance across fiber vendors, starting with ONT receive power and fiber length for three leading manufacturers—Adtran. Calix, and Ubiquiti.
For each vendor, we’ve gathered an equal sample size to identify meaningful patterns in the data and provide our analysis and interpretation of what these patterns mean for fiber network operators.
Intuitively, you would expect that the signal loss increases as the fiber length increases and that the patterns would be roughly similar across vendors.
From this random sample of ONTs, it appears that our customers deploy Adtran on longer fiber runs as compared to Calix and Ubiquiti. As expected, there is a slight decrease in signal strength with distance which is much more apparent in the Adtran data because of the longer fiber runs.
Also interesting is the relatively wide variation in signal strength, from -10 to -25 over distances of less than 5 kilometers (approx. 3.1 miles). Looking at this, there are a few areas for future exploration:
- Does this fluctuate over the day or week? We have this data at one-minute granularity so it’s possible to look at this over time.
- This simple analysis isn’t normalized by the ISP. That is, it could be biased toward a specific customer and, as a result, be biased toward their deployment practices.
- We also have this information for each PON, along with ONT metrics. Is the median ONT receive power on each PON plotted against distance more interesting?
When you have lots of data, there are so many things that are possible!
Did you find this useful? We’d love your thoughts on what network trends we should look at next. Fill out the form here to let us know.
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