We recently found an issue on our newer ONTs, that may restrict your ability to configure services using DHCP or ARP protocols. Don't worry. We’re not aware of it impacting live customers. Regardless, we’re still implementing a fix to remove this restriction. This gives you the greatest flexibility to configure services in the future.

What's happening?

Customer testing recently identified an issue with how our newer ONTs process DHCP protocols. This limits DHCP to UDP ports 67/68. These ONTs have been deployed since mid-2015 and have a QR Code.

Nokia, our ONT vendor has now provided a software patch to remove this restriction. This patch is currently being tested. We’re aiming to deploy it from 3 October.

What's the detail?

As part of the analysis of this issue, Nokia examined differences in how our older and newer ONTs process packets. This identified differences in the way newer ONTS process DHCP and ARP protocols, which could lead to future issues.

We found the newer ONTs restrict DHCP requests to UDP ports 67/68. This is the default configuration for DHCP, and we haven’t observed this constraint impacting any live customers. However, we recommend you liaise with your network design engineers to check if any of your customers might be affected.

This fix will remove this constraint. It will also future proof ARP Processing by changing the processing from software to hardware-based.

Once the patch has been fully tested, it will be loaded onto ONTs associated with five OLTs on Monday 3 October. There will be a small outage (less than a minute) during the maintenance window, while the patch is activated. It will then be soak tested for at least a week.

Once the soak testing has been completed, the patch will be rolled out to the rest of the network. Given this constraint does not appear to impact any live customers, the patch will be activated upon the next ONT reboot. Alternatively it can be force-loaded by turning the ONT off and on.

This software patch is not expected to have any impact on your services.

Who do I contact?

If you suspect you have a customer affected or would like to test the patch independently/get a test plan summary, please contact your service delivery manager or account manager.