On Tue, 16 May 2023 12:23:24 +1200, Ian Stewart wrote:
As an aside... remember the old days of household telephones and how the phone company provided the 48V DC to make your phone operate. When you had a power outage you could still make phone calls. What an amazing design concept / service provider!
That was always my concern with the idea of moving to a VoIP phone connection. But it appears the days of the copper network are numbered anyway. The assumption seems to be that people will have mobile phones (with some degree of charge left in them) to make emergency calls in the event of a power failure.
On the outside of your house is a External Termination Point (ETP) box. This does not require any electrical power. This is where what appears like one fibre optic cable arrives from a Tuatahi distribution box somewhere in your street.
First a crew comes and lays down an empty tube between the wall of your house and a hole in the street. Then another crew connects the street end of this empty tube to an allocated empty one of a bundle of 24 tubes running along your part of the street -- this will provide the path for a continuous run of fibre between your house and some central connection point -- the guys I spoke to said there were just two of these in Hamilton, and the one I was to be connected to is in the Government Life building. However, in my case, they couldn’t find that bundle of 24. A few different crews came and went. Then a pair of guys came back repeatedly over several days, hunting round, digging a few holes, and finally found it, in a slightly different place from where the plan said it had been laid. And on the wrong side of the driveway to the rear house from the hole that had already been dug to connect to my house. But that’s OK. Another crew came a few days ago, connected the two ends, and blew the fibre through. So that’s my Layer 1 connection done.
Theoretically you should be able to log in and manage the ONT box by entering 192.168.100.1 into your browser and entering the account and password. However the ONT box is always the property of Tuatahi and I suspect you will find that they don't hand out the password.
Yeah, hopefully I don’t need to do that. ;)
Using such an ONT box in NZ would effectively make Tuatahi the only necessary ISP and the other ISP's would not be required. Oh dear, shock / horror, we couldn't have that!
I’m sure such an option would be very popular in countries with toothless anti-trust competition watchdogs. Like the USA.
So, I believe your ONT can go directly to a PC provided this link is using PPPoE ...
I wonder if that depends on the ISP, though? Some use PPPoE, others might set up a simple point-to-point LAN connection as per that discussion thread I referenced.
E.g. Install OpenWrt (x86/amd64 version) on your PC.
That would be for a dedicated router. In my case, I would want to use the same machine I use for data backups and some other long-duration, low-priority functions. The standard “ppp” package in Debian includes a lot of options, including plugins for handling both PPP-over-Ethernet and PPP-over-ATM, so I will give that a try. Thanks for your help.