Hello fellow community members,
I wanted to create this glossary-like document to help explain and define certain terms and abbreviations. Sometimes, community leaders and Verizon employees may use technical terms for more precise communication and save of time. To avoid the need to define the terms over and over again, and to disambiguate certain technical concepts, I now present you a list of terms and abbreviations frequently used in community-based troubleshooting.
ONT - Optical Network Terminal; a media converter that converts light signal to electrical signal (namely from 3 wavelengths of light to Ethernet, POTs, and/or Linear TV Signal, respectively); a device of white or black enclosure, serves as the demarcation point between the Verizon network and your home network.
OLT - Optical Line Terminal; the upstream device of numerous ONTs. An OLT contains multiple Line cards. Each line card terminates numerous PON lines.
PON - Passive Optical Network. Typically, PON line - An "aggregated" fiber optic line that is typically split into 32 or 64 fiber optic lines that each goes to the ONT of a customer. EPON - Ethernet Passive Optical Network (slower and deployed by Verizon in 2004/5 ? trace history); GPON - Gigabit Passive Optical Network (the basis for the 940/880 Mbps speed, deployed in 2005 ? Right after the realization of the speed limitations of EPON).
NG-PON2 - Next Generation-Passive Optical Network 2 (the basis for the 2300/2300 Mbps speed in Fios 2 Gig). This is the newer PON technology and allows the aggregation of 4 wavelengths of light in a single fiber. Each wavelength could carry around 8.2Gbps (~nominally 10Gbps 😊). This allows more splits on a PON line, or more bandwidth-hungry customers on the same PON line.
GWR - Gateway Router - the network device that is upstream of the OLTs. This is a provider (VZ!) router that hands out DHCP WAN addresses, both IPv4 and IPv6. This device limits the number of WAN addresses being allocated.
CPR - Customer Premise Router [disambiguation - not CardioPulmonary Resuscitation] - This is the router that is downstream of the customer ONT.
CPE - Customer Premise Equipment - Similar meaning to CPR, but may refer to any network devices on the customer network, whether the device being a router or other.
Verizon Router - CR1000A/B. This term specifically refers to Verizon routers with the model number CR1000A or CR1000B.
Fios Router - Model number G3100 router
Fios Quantum Gateway Router / BHR 4 - Model number G1100
BHR - Broadband Home Router - Although small-medium businesses also use this router, this is the technical name for Verizon routers deployed at customers' premises, dating back to the very first BHR made by ActionTec.
ACS - Automatic Configuration Server - This is the server behind the GWR that manages Verizon routers on the customer network. It could upload new firmware to the router and allow the engineering department to remotely diagnose and troubleshoot the router. TR069 is the protocol used. ACS seems to only work when a Verizon router is on a Fios PON circuit. If you were to re-use Verizon router on a non-Fios service, it might not pull the updates, which creates security vulnerabilities. Verizon routers might have a secondary unicast-based pulling mechanism, then the previous sentence does not apply.
Terms in the working...
2.4GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz.
Wireless controllers, wireless radios, SSID, PSK (Pre-Shared Key), MU-MIMO, 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax/bn (WiFi 1/2/3/4/5/6/7) [I will populate this after I learn about wireless networking in some depth]
MAC (Media Access Control address) - This is a 48-bit address assigned to network interfaces on a data link segment. MAC addresses do not need to be globally unique, but they can be.
IPv4 Address - Internet Protocol Version 4 Address - This is a 32-bit address assigned to network interfaces on a network segment. Besides certain address blocks reserved for private-use, testing, multicast, and other purposes, other addresses are globally unique.
IPv6 Address - Internet Protocol Version 6 Address - This is a 128-bit address, serving virtually the same functions as an IPv4 address. Fios pushed an ACS update to turn off IPv6 on Verizon routers pending an upgrade of the Nokia ONT firmware to remove paddings on IPv6 packets. The paddings were added many many years ago for unknown reasons (likely lost track of in the file cabinets, in my opinion). IPv6 is still available if customer wishes to turn it on.
Verizon GWRs are Juniper routers (if you do a packet capture on your WAN port, and look at the MAC address Organizationally Unique Identifier), so they operate on JunOS, which are largely Linux boxes, in my opinion. Well, Cisco IOS 16 is also moving to Linux. The GWRs allow both SLAAC and Prefix Delegation (PD). The Prefix is /56 bit, so you could chop it further to multiple /64's to your liking. Verizon routers so far does not allow multiple /64 blocks besides the br-lan (main LAN network).
Band steering, Access Point Steering, 802.11r/v/k, SON - Self-Organizing Network. IoT Wireless Network (Internet of Things), Guest Wireless Network, VLAN ID 10, VLAN Trunking,
E3200, CE1000A, backhaul. MoCA. Coax Splitters, D band, C band. E band. F band.
