Posted by chaz6 3 hours ago
Broadband Network Gateway (BNG)[1]
[1]: https://github.com/codelaboratoryltd/bng#bng-broadband-netwo...
> OLT = Optical Line Terminal.
> In ISP fiber (typically GPON/EPON) infrastructure, it’s the provider-side device at the central office/headend that terminates and controls the passive optical network: it connects upstream into the ISP’s aggregation/core network and downstream via fiber (through splitters) to many customers’ ONTs/ONUs, handling PON line control, provisioning, QoS, and traffic aggregation.
We ended using a couple of cheap Mikrotik as PPPoE concentrators for every access room, in a similar way as you did. But the reliability of Mikrotik routers was not the best
Even if you were to roll your own cable in the ground to your own ONT/OLT/BNG at some point you will need to acquire IP transit or peering from other commercial entities.
A hypothetical court order saying something like "kill internet access" would likely cause an IP transit service to stop working (implemented by said provider no longer announcing global IP routing tables to that service) but a leased line between two locations would likely remain untouched since that isn't an "internet" service. So they might not need to come knocking if they're reasonably confident that all such edge cases like leased lines end up at dead-ends because any internet-capable product they might be enabling access to is sufficiently disabled.
I do imagine though that if they get as far as "kill the internet" that obtaining a subsequent court order to go after some suspicious leased line would be trivial.
As a side note, I find that IP transit is typically the cheapest aspect of providing an internet service since a cross-connect at a well connected DC will cost well under $1/Mbps/month unmetered. Plus the cost is very well amortized when residential users are the target. This has tended to hold when one takes into account the co-lo costs as well since network gear doing relatively basic packet forwarding/internet table routing doesn't take up that much space or power.