Hawuei 4 port ONT

[licquorice]

I'm afraid you misunderstand how GPON works.

Every ONT has access to all 32 services of the PON multiplexed on the incoming fibre. The individual service is then extracted to the Ethernet port. Therefore in the case of a 4 port ONT, 4 discrete services can be extracted to the 4 ports 

[iniltous]

I’m not sure you appreciate what a 4 port ONT  is , but it’s basically 4 x single port ONT’s inside 1 box , saving on space , power supply units etc , plus the way PON ( passive optical networks ) actually work , you don’t need 4 input fibres to run 4 separate services , because every fibre on the output side of a PON splitter are identical, the same data appears on every output fibre simultaneously ,  so it’s not necessary to use 4 input fibres to the 4 port ONT as 3 of them would serve  no purpose being duplicates  , therefore having multiple inputs fibres is unnecessary ( if they are all carrying the same data , 1 fibre will do you don’t need 4 inputs on a 4 port ONT  ) that’s why there is only 1 input fibre but the ability to run up-to 4 separate services .

As stated your explanation makes no sense, you can’t simply move the Ethernet cable to the router from port 1 to port 2 on the ONT and expect service to work , if you did  that and the service started to work  the only logical explanation is that the service was already configured on port 2 but for some reason the customers  router was incorrectly connected to port 1, that’s why the service wasn’t working , and you shifting the cable to port 2 rectified the fact that the cable was in the wrong place (port)  ,  once you put the cable in the correct port , the service started working .

[TobyOneKenobi]

@iniltous well this is why I'm asking questions, as I've said I've not come across a 4 port ONT before and as I had got the BB up and and running by swapping from P1 to P2 I'd assumed that the 4 ports were a LAN switch, I'd no idea that you could have different ISP's  on the same Fibre connection @licquorice  yes I was aware that each ONT receives upto 32 services but hadn't really occurred to me that they could be from different ISP's , something  now with hindsight seems blindingly obvious.  So now being a little more enlightened, it is indeed very odd that swapping from P1 to P2 would resolve the fault and does suggest that it should have been P2 and the port connection was changed by someone, but I have to say that the customer did not seem to be very technical aware enough to have fiddled with it and if that is the case it seems odd that the  service was set to use P2 instead of P1. Thanks for all the explanations.

[TobyOneKenobi]

Just a thought but is it possible, for whatever reason, that the ISP had changed what port their service is allocated to?

[licquorice]

Yes, that would be possible.

[iniltous]

We can only speculate, in the OP you stated that the customer had several engineer visits (although you later said you didn’t think they had ) ….a possible scenario is the Openreach techs had the service moved from port 1 to port 2 but never moved the Ethernet cable (or the customer moved it back ) .

I would have said the EE service was always on port 2 , and for whatever reason the Ethernet cable was in port 1 , but that doesn’t align with the customer saying service was working and then stopped , unless of course the reason it was working briefly was port 2 was allocated by EE , perhaps because port 1 still had an active service from the previous occupants ISP , the new occupant orders service with EE , who can only allocate port 2 ( because port 1 still has an active service, the previous occupant hadn’t ceased it  correctly yet  ) , the new customer incorrectly plugs in their EE router to port 1 , and unknowingly is using the previous occupants service , without appreciating that port 2 was also ‘live’ and was the correct port for them ….eventually the previous occupant service ceases on port 1 , and the current occupant  loses service assuming it was their service that has stopped so must be faulty , when in fact it was the previous occupants service they were using , the new customer reports it , causing much confusion…..

you come along , connect the EE router  to port 2 (as was always intended) and it’s working.

As I said , idle speculation on my part , it’s unimportant really if their service is working.

[TobyOneKenobi]

@iniltous  "We can only speculate, in the OP you stated that the customer had several engineer visits (although you later said you didn’t think they had )". No, I said they had several visits from internal engineers these are not Openreach engineers however I may not have made this clear. Most ISP's will send internal engineers first regardless of what the reported fault is, sometimes you'll get several visits for the same fault because support staff book the wrong engineers or that the internal engineer did not close the job correctly or did not directly escalate the call to OR.

Unfortunately now we can only speculate.  Quite often customers "forget" or overlook certain things especially if they think they might be charged if it was something they did, but just got the feeling that this guy was being honest. I forgot to mention that this customer was recently moved from BT to EE so this could add more weight to the argument that the port was reassigned . Yes I suppose it's unimportant as the fault is resolved but you don't learn anything if you don't know and don't ask. I now know more than I did, if I hadn't asked I  would have continued to think that those ports were part of a switch and that you could only have one service per property!  So thank you.