GPON FTTH @ 2.5Gbps (Italy), LAGG interface to the ISP router (Gigabit eth)
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as per title, that's more or less my situation.
this italian ISP has just provided me with GPON fiber to the home, the speed is 2.5Gbit / 500 Mbit.
it does work at that speed, long story short that cannot be achieved by a single host, not over wifi 6, not over ethernet (the router comes with 4 gigabit ethernet), their whole design revolves around providing that max speed to multiple clients at the same time, over wifi or eth cables.so I'm thinking of using a pfsense box and do a LAGG with 3 gigabit ethernet interfaces on the ISP side and rewiring my LAN with 10Gbit ethernet, the pfsense box would have two cards, one with multiple gigabit interfaces and one with a 10Gbit.
do you guys foresee this actually working to get a single device on the LAN using the full 2.5Gbit bandwidth? I understand the best case scenario would be 1GBit over a single tcp connection, but the same host should theoretically be able to achieve 2.5Gbit across multiple tcp connections.
am I understanding this correctly?
moreover considering the 2.5Gbit download and the 500Mbit upload I think either Loadbalance or Round Robin should theoretically work, is that so?
does anybody here has experience with doing this kind of thing with a GPON home fiber router? did it work?
btw it's a vodafone station 6, I don't know if it's been sold in other places as well by Vodafone. -
Does the ISP router support any sort of LAG configuration on it's LAN ports?
I assume they are probably switched ports so must have a 2.5G internal connection?
It may be possible to use an SFP/GPON adapter in pfSense directly though it usually requires significant work to even test that.
I would not be too hopeful about using a load-balance type LAGG directly without any support for that on the router.
Steve
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@stephenw10 said in GPON FTTH @ 2.5Gbps (Italy), LAGG interface to the ISP router (Gigabit eth):
Does the ISP router support any sort of LAG configuration on it's LAN ports?
they don't
It may be possible to use an SFP/GPON adapter in pfSense directly though it usually requires significant work to even test that.
that is what I wanted to avoid, theare are threads on the interwebs about doing such things, it basically means hacking an SFP ONT stick by laoding modified firmware to even work with the ISP.
I assume they are probably switched ports so must have a 2.5G internal connection?
it's a SOC with an embedded linux, since I can top two gigabit ethernet with two devices I'm assuming the onboard bus can achieve 2.5Gbit, probably even more than that.
the problem is getting that on a single device (my laptop).
they got wifi 802.11ax, but only 2 antennas, so it's not possible to get more than 1Gbit over wifi, and the 4 cable ports are gigabit.
it's a bit of a conundrum how to achieve that, I might give a try to a LAGG and see how it goes anyways, both on the bsd and linux stack, it probably won't work but I'm gonna try anyway.the only other way I can see to achieve that would be to use two physical devices, maybe two raspberry 4 which can actually achieve gigabit speed, and then loadbalance those with a pfsense, so three devices in total.
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@stephenw10 said in GPON FTTH @ 2.5Gbps (Italy), LAGG interface to the ISP router (Gigabit eth):
It may be possible to use an SFP/GPON adapter in pfSense directly though it usually requires significant work to even test that.
on that note, the SFP /GPON stick requires to establish a connection over HSGMII, which I'm told it's non standard for most SFP equipped boards (I myself am a bit confused why it should be the board supporting it and not just the ISP on their side and the stick itself)
I'm told by enthusiasts who "hacked" their GPON sticks that these boards supports HSGMII:
Broadcom 57810S 10Gbps
and HPE 530SFP+ and more Dell models.do you know if those are supported by the bsd kernel out of the box?
apparently there are firmwares floating around for the GPON sticks for the various ISP, and legally they are actually required to allow you to use your own network equipment, at least here in Italy, which would then allow me to use a 10Gbit eth towards my LAN and get the full speed on a single device/connection.
That's the theory tho, I'm told when you ask that they just install an external ONT connector in your home that has an eth port and that's a gigabit connector that you connect to your router as any common WAN, so you're capped at 1Gbit by the connector itself....so the only way left is to either aggregate the links to your ISP 2.5Gbit proveded router or to hack an SFP/GPON stick and make it work with your provider.
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I would expect both those cards to be supported by the bxe(4) driver:
https://github.com/pfsense/FreeBSD-src/blob/RELENG_2_5_2/sys/dev/bxe/bxe.c#L142The HPE 530SFP+ also appears to be based on the Broadcom 57810S.
You may need to modify the card though to get them to link at 2.5G. It sounds like you've already started looking into that.
Yes, you should try the LAGG setup since it might work OK and requires no additional hardware.
Your ISP probably provides some sort of business grade connection using the same fiber. I would look at what equipment they supply with that. It may be you can just get that and use it.
Steve
