Application Note

GPON Xpert™ – Testing and Troubleshooting GPON

Interoperability Issues
In today's competitive environment providers are looking for ways to speed up the
service bring-up for new customers and reduce the costs associated with capital
investment, installation and continuous operations.
In the early days of GPON service providers cared primarily about getting the service
to work, and the easiest way to ensure this was to purchase an end-to-end GPON
solution from a single vendor, who was responsible to make it work. Providers that
used multiple vendors in their network divided their service area into different
regions, and within each region used the same vendor for the OLT and the ONUs or
ONTs.
However, in today's competitive environment providers are looking for ways to speed
up the service bring-up for new customers and reduce the costs associated with capital
investment, installation and continuous operations. To address this, they are
continuously looking for new ONUs that are capable of supporting their new
requirements, as well as achieving cost-reduction without sacrificing their service
quality levels.
Acceptance and approval of a new ONU model or version requires at least two phases
of testing:
• Phase 1: testing the ONU on a stand-alone basis
• Phase 2: end-to-end testing of services on the network, which includes the
ONU in conjunction with the OLT and additional network elements
In case of failure in phase 2, the results of phase 1 may be used to help isolate the
faulty element.
TraceSpan's GPON Xpert™ analyzer and OLT Emulator is an excellent tool to
address the need for both these phases of testing. For phase 1, the OLT Emulator
allows testing the ONU on a stand-alone basis, with a wide variety of pre-defined or
user-defined test cases. For phase 2 GPON Xpert can be used as a passive analyzer for
the end-to-end network testing. It can also export PLOAM and OMCI messages and
later on play them back into the ONU as an OLT emulator.
When an ONU connects to an OLT, it first has to complete the activation process,
often called ranging. The OLT may then request the ONU to identify itself by a
password, which is an optional means of security applied in some networks. After this
phase, the OLT will setup the ONU's service configuration with OMCI messages and
then the ONU is ready to deliver the service.

© 2002 – 2015 TraceSpan™ Communications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Proprietary and Confidential
Last Updated: June 22, 2015

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 Application Note

In spite of the efforts of standards bodies and industry forums to establish open GPON
standards and clearly define each of the phases in this process, mixing GPON
equipment from different vendors still often results in failure to deliver services. In
many cases the ONU will complete the activation process but will not be able deliver
the service, and this may be a result of anything from a simple password conflict to a
more complex OMCI service setup issue.
More and more service providers have chosen not to rely solely on their vendors to
resolve these issues and have adopted a proactive approach of using GPON Xpert for
viewing the message exchange on the PON at the different layers and pointing out
conflicts and errors. This puts them in a much stronger position to demand their
vendors to resolve the issues.

© 2002 – 2015 TraceSpan™ Communications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Proprietary and Confidential
Last Updated: June 22, 2015

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 Application Note

Interoperability Issues – Examples

The following screenshots provide examples of interoperability issues as they are
presented with the GPON Xpert, and demonstrate its capabilities of pointing out the
sources of these issues.
In the first example, the ONU "bounces" and fails to establish stable connection with
the OLT, and GPON Xpert presents this with multiple instances of the ONU on the
left side of the screen, each of which has a red X indication.

By drilling into the details of the message exchange, the user can easily see that the
OLT sends a deactivation message to the ONU immediately after it receives its
password, and the likely cause for this is a password conflict. GPON Xpert also
presents the password details in both Hexadecimal and ASCII formats, to allow the
user to compare it with the password registered in the OLT for this ONU.

© 2002 – 2015 TraceSpan™ Communications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Proprietary and Confidential
Last Updated: June 22, 2015

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 Application Note

The next example presents an interoperability problem resulting from an OMCI

message error. In this case again the ONU "bounces" and fails to establish stable
connection with the OLT.

When drilling into the messages, GPON Xpert presents an OMCI 'Unknown ME'
error in the response message sent by the ONU. GPON Xpert also highlights the
relevant message with a yellow color to indicate the event and allow the user to easily
identify the cause for the issue. Advanced searching and filtering mechanisms further
expedite this process.

Summary
The GPON Xpert OLT Emulator combined with the best-in-class GPON analyzer is a
complete cost-effective and integrative testing tool for GPON equipment and
networks. It addresses the need for testing an ONU on a stand-alone basis as well as
for end-to-end testing of the GPON network.
This prevents finger pointing between vendors and significantly speeds up the process
of getting multi-vendor OLTs and ONUs to work together.

© 2002 – 2015 TraceSpan™ Communications Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

Proprietary and Confidential
Last Updated: June 22, 2015

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