During the setup of my SFP fibre connection and ONT testing I was made aware of the importance of the fibre connection attenuation by Marcin at LeoLabs. Further research on LaFibre led me to discover the permitted attenuation values for OrangeFR installers in this very old post - which was -27 dBmin 2012. I have not been able to find other concrete refererences, but it would not surprise me if this was revised to the Class B+ limit of -28 dBm or slightly above it at -27.5 dBm.
Testing the Leox ONT revealed that under some circumstances under load I would have dropped packets. The reason for this is the attenuation of my line at my apartment (lets call it Apartment#2), was -26.9 dBm measured by my Livebox, just inside the 2012 Orange limit. Nevertheless this was not acceptable for the Leox (Marcin indicated that generally for LeoLabs they prefer -25 dBm or higher for optimum connection quality). At the time of my initial testing 6 months prior to running the tests in this section, I did not test the Livebox5 properly. The TP-Link ONT on hand passed all connection tests, however is not able to reach full 1G speed due to firmware bugs. Finally later on when I tested my SFP ONT, it was in the middle of the road, achieving full 2G speeds, however showing some minor packet loss under load.
Naturally now that I have a range of ONTs, I ask the question of what is best for my current use case at Apartment#2?
This section covers the testing of different ONTs to determine which one is best for real world situations for my context at Apartment#2 and its associated line quality (which may not necessarily mean the fastest as per Ookla’s speedtest!). This will also provide the method and tools used for future rented apartments (#3 and beyond!) to assess which ONT is best.
My hypothesis is that the TP-Link Class C+ ONT will be best for poor quality lines, and the SFP ONT (Class B+) best for “clean” lines. For Apartment#2 it is difficult to predict if the SFP ONT packet loss performance compromise for poor quality lines will be small enough to justify using its higher speeds over the TP-Link ONT. The testing results should answer this concern.