When choosing Mini OLT products, in addition to focus on the differences in hardware design, customers often overlook the design distinctions at the software level. A few years ago, the industry generally believed that the research and development threshold for the entire OLT software was extremely high, and only a few leading manufacturers had the development capabilities. Nowadays, there are many manufacturers in the market claiming that they can independently develop the supporting software for Mini OLT, which leads people to have a one-sided understanding: at the software design level, it is only necessary to implement basic ONU registration, data forwarding, and provide a simple Web management interface to meet the usage needs of customers.
In fact, it is far more than that simple. What truly determines whether the equipment can operate stably for a long time is the telecommunication-grade software capabilities of the entire set of these mini olt gpon products, including deep adaptation to the OMCI protocol, compatibility with multiple brand ONUs, secure remote firmware upgrading capacity, independent DBA bandwidth scheduling, and suppression of rogue ONUs and other core functions. If only some basic functions are met and a large number of key functions are cut off on your 1 pon gpon mini olt or mini olt 1 port hardware, once encountering multi-terminal high-concurrency scenarios, it is easy to encounter registration failure, business lag and disconnection and other faults, which will greatly increase the pressure of later operation and maintenance.
This article will introduce the design key points of the product from the perspective of software disassembly, objectively sort out the key points of the design of this type of product, and provide a practical basis for small and medium-sized users to judge the quality of the product.
1. Mini OLT Configuration
In accordance with the standards of the telecommunications grade, a complete OLT software must support six types of independent configurations. The functions of each template are as follows:
a. DBA Profile
Manage the T-CONT bandwidth policy, configure guaranteed bandwidth CIR, burst bandwidth EIR, and scheduling priority. Distinguish between regular broadband, monitoring, and voice stream to avoid congestion and lag in high-concurrency uplink.
b. Traffic Profile
Control the upstream and downstream forwarding rates, assign fixed speed limit for broadband, IPTV, and monitoring, achieve precise bandwidth limit based on user contracts, and prevent a single terminal from seizing the bandwidth resources of the entire PON port.
c. Line Profile
Bind the underlying parameters of the optical line, including the optical power alarm , ONU registration duration, ranging parameters, and error code alarm, to monitor link attenuation in real time and proactively report anomalies.
d. Service Profile
Divide the basic services such as broadband Internet access, IPTV multicast, and industrial data, configure vlans, bind ports, and batch distribute them to the same type of ONUs to simplify the configuration process.
e. VOIP Profile
Adapt to telephone voice services, configure SIP registration parameters, silent detection, etc.
f. TR069 Profile
It automatically connects to the operator's ACS network management platform, enabling remote parameter distribution, status collection, fault reporting, and batch firmware upgrades via ONU. There is no need for on-site debugging, significantly reducing the workload of operation and maintenance in small and medium-sized scenarios.
Currently, some Mini OLTs on the market only retain basic traffic and service VLAN functions. Once multiple services such as broadband, voice and monitoring are superimposed concurrently, problems such as bandwidth allocation imbalance, voice lag and remote upgrade failure are very likely to occur. The Mini OLT software of Rayin Technology fully retains the entire set of telecommunication-grade template configurations and is suitable for long-term stable operation and maintenance in multiple scenarios such as small and medium-sized operators, hotels, and surveillance.
2. Operation and Maintenance Section
Many Mini OLTs on the market adopt simplified designs in terms of operation and maintenance，such as, mini olt gpon 32 onu and mini gpon olt 1 port. Functions such as traffic statistics, alarm management, and batch upgrades are merely "functional", which makes the products lack the ability for refined operation and maintenance.
a. Traffic Statistics
If we only conside the total traffic of a single PON port during the design, it will be impossible to view the traffic of a single ONU and monitor the segmented traffic. Also, because there is no historical record, when the device freezes, it can only be powered off one by one for troubleshooting. However, in reality, an OLT with well-designed software functions has real-time rate data, historical congestion curve records, and can precisely locate faulty terminals.
b. Alarm Management
If the alarm function merely provides basic indications for ONU online and offline status, and lacks critical alarms for optical attenuation and bandwidth storms, along with issues such as short log storage that gets cleared upon power loss, inability to interface with unified network management, and no prior warnings for faults, then the cost of troubleshooting when issues arise becomes very high.
If the alarm function only has basic prompts for ONU going online and offline, but lacks key alarms such as light attenuation and bandwidth storm, and there are problems such as short log storage and power-off clearance, inability to connect to the unified network management, and no early warning when faults occur, then the cost of troubleshooting will be very high.
c. ONU Bulk Upgrade
Most of the 1 to 2-port Mini OLT devices on the market are designed for small-scale scenarios of up to 200 households. During the research and development stage, they did not benchmark against the batch operation and maintenance standards of the telecommunications industry. They only implemented the basic batch upgrade function and lacked traffic control and refined management mechanisms. When a large number of terminals are upgraded simultaneously, the firmware transmission messages will occupy the bandwidth of broadband and high-definition monitoring services, causing network connecting lagging and interruption of monitoring images. At the same time, it is impossible to view the upgrade status of each ONU in real time. After the upgrade is completed, the version of each ONU can only be manually checked one by one, which leads to the need for frequent operations to troubleshoot faulty terminals and retries.
Rayin Technology's Mini Combo OLT has a batch upgrade logic that benchmarks against telecom-grade standards and is equipped with multiple optimization mechanisms for managing mini gpon olt files and mini gpon olt software: First, it limits the speed of upgraded traffic bandwidth, isolates firmware transmission messages, does not seize broadband, and monitors real-time services; Second, visualize and monitor the progress in real time, and display the status of each ONU separately. The status that can be displayed includes "O Download in Progress", "Image Verification", "Restart Activation", "Upgrade Successful", and "verification failed". Thirdly, after the upgrade task is completed, all ONU firmware versions can be read in batches with one click, and the upgrade results will be automatically verified. Fourth, for failed terminals, individual screening and batch retry can be carried out without the need to redistribute all of them, which can ultimately significantly reduce the workload of operation and maintenance.
3. Summary
Therefore, when choosing a Mini OLT, one should not only compare the prices but also focus on checking the software function list provided by the manufacturer. Whether some software functions are provided will directly determine the later operation and maintenance costs and network stability. If you are unable to determine which supporting functions are essential for your project or are unsure whether the existing equipment has any functional deficiencies, engineers from Rayin Technology can provide free technical assessment and solution consultation services. For complete product solutions and technical white papers, please visit our official website: www.szrayin.com.
