For most subscribers, fibre ends in a small white box the ISP hands over. You did not choose it, you cannot audit what runs on it, and when it fails you wait for a replacement. That box is where the open internet quietly stops being open.
Open PON Foundation exists to change that. It is a vendor-neutral, volunteer effort for open, interoperable and privacy-respecting passive optical networking — and the site is live now at openpon.org.
Why a foundation
The work has been happening for years already, scattered across forums, Telegram groups and personal repositories. People in Malaysia, Japan, Belarus, Canada and a dozen other places have been reverse engineering GPON and XGS-PON sticks, writing firmware for them, and quietly helping each other get past OLT quirks that no vendor documents.
What was missing was a shared front door. Somewhere to point a newcomer that says: here is the firmware, here is the hardware it runs on, here are the countries it works in, and here is who to talk to in your region.
The vision lines up with three organisations that have already proven these ideas work at scale — the Electronic Frontier Foundation on user rights and privacy, the Open Networking Foundation on open and disaggregated access networks, and the Linux Foundation on neutral governance and shared engineering effort.
The part that needs regulating
Every argument here eventually runs into the same wall: none of what the ISP does is against any rule. An operator can mandate its own ONT, lock the firmware, keep a management channel open into your house, refuse to accept equipment you supply yourself, and bill rental on the box indefinitely. In most of the world there is nothing that says it cannot.
In some places there is. EU Regulation 2015/2120 gives end users the right to use terminal equipment of their choice, and BEREC has since published guidelines on where the network termination point actually sits — which is precisely the question that decides whether the box on your wall is the operator’s network or yours. Germany has had Routerfreiheit written into law since 2016. Italy settled its modem libero rules along the same lines.
Malaysia has no equivalent. Neither do most of the markets on our coverage map.
That gap is a large part of why this had to become a foundation rather than stay a forum thread. Where the rules already protect the subscriber, open firmware is a convenience. Where they do not, it is the only leverage a subscriber has — and a scattered group of hobbyists cannot put that case to a regulator. An organisation with a name, a stated position and members willing to be listed publicly can.
To be clear about the ask. Not that operators be forced to support every stick anyone flashes, and not that anyone be allowed to put whatever they like on a shared network. Just that the demarcation be honest: the operator’s responsibility ends at the fibre, what runs on the subscriber’s side is the subscriber’s choice, and equipment somebody paid for belongs to them.
What is on the site
Four independent firmware projects, each maintained by the people who reverse engineered the platform it runs on:
- NIJIKA — GPON, RTL960x. Broad OLT compatibility, VEIP support, link speed unbound from 1GbE to 2.5GbE, and metrics exported straight to Prometheus and Grafana.
- ZRV OS — GPON, RTL9602. An independent operating system born out of clean-room reverse engineering.
- 8311 — XGS-PON. The reference open firmware for 10G subscriber deployments.
- CA8271x — XGS-PON, with a focus on Japanese operator interoperability.
On the hardware side, MikroTik is the reference platform and the vendor that made 2.5 Gbps PON sticks practical — RouterOS carried 2.5G SFP link rates from v7.11, ahead of most of the market. The RB5009 is the most popular host by a distance, and its 10G SFP+ cage takes GPON and XGS-PON sticks alike. If you want the whole path open, a Banana Pi BPI-R4 running OpenWrt means there is no vendor firmware left anywhere between the fibre and your LAN.
There is also a coverage map of 19 countries with working deployments, 14 contributors credited by name, and regional suppliers across Malaysia, Turkey, Belarus, Vietnam and the Dominican Republic.
What “open” actually means here
One thing the site is deliberately honest about: not every layer is ours to open. Some sticks still carry vendor code that has never been published — the Huawei ME350, ME370 and ME373 among them — and no amount of community work changes that.
What these projects do guarantee is everything built around it. Developed in the open, auditable in behaviour, tested against real operators for compatibility, and written so that nothing personal is reported back. Where a network mandates TR-069, the firmware emulates it rather than phoning home: the ISP gets a management endpoint, your data stays on your side of the fibre.
Claiming more than that would be easy and would be wrong. Anyone who has actually opened one of these sticks would spot it immediately.
A word before you order a stick
PON is a shared medium. A single misbehaving ONU can disrupt upstream synchronisation for every subscriber on the same fibre split, and operators monitor for exactly that. The consequences are real: disconnection, blacklisting, in some places financial penalties.
Open PON Foundation discourages reckless DIY deployment. A live network is not a place to experiment.
None of the argument above works if the sticks misbehave. Asking a regulator to respect the demarcation point only carries weight if our side of it is well behaved, which is why compatibility testing gets as much attention on the site as the firmware itself.
That is also why the suppliers page distinguishes between managed providers who will take the deployment end to end, businesses that sell you hardware and leave the rest to you, and community members helping out on their own time. If you are not confident, engage someone who is — and be aware that community support is voluntary, limited and given as a favour, not as a contract.
Have a look
The site is at openpon.org. If you run open firmware on a stick in a country not yet on the coverage map, or you supply and deploy in a region that is not listed, get in touch — both lists are meant to grow.
For deeper technical documentation on GPON ONT hacking, hack-gpon.org remains the best reference around.