Fiber

If you have fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), your ISP almost certainly gave you a combo ONT/router. It’s a locked-down all-in-one box that does GPON optical termination, routing, Wi-Fi, and often double NAT. For a homelab with VLAN segmentation and a proper router like MikroTik, that box is a bottleneck — and you can bypass it entirely. This post covers replacing the ISP ONT/router with a MikroTik router using an SFP GPON stick, covering the hardware, VLAN configurations, PPPoE quirks, and the gotchas that aren’t in the marketing material. This is specifically from my experience with Dominican Republic FTTH providers, but the patterns apply to most GPON deployments globally. ...