POE Injector Installed by LCO

A few months back the Excitel LCO changed the wiring, since there were some frequent disconnection issues. Earlier there was a single Ethernet wire that was plugged directly into the router.

Now the LCO has setup a POE Injector in between so the flow is as follows:
Wire from pole (Thicker Ethernet Cable than before) -> POE Injector -> Ethernet Cable to Router

I didn't pay much attention to the installation at that time, I do remember the LCO saying something about fibre till pole. But I've recently started wondering what's the use of this POE Injector? It's not powering on anything in the house so it must be supplying power to some device outside (maybe a switch)? I've never seen such a setup and google has not anything relatable.

Something similar was installed my house too (source: reddit post, I'll include some pictures too)

The black wire on the left is the one coming from the pole and the grey/white wire goes to my routers WAN port. The black wire on top is the power cable for the POE Injector.

I found a similar post on reddit but that didn't have much answers either. The post has some more details.
Source

It made my excitel connection pretty stable. It powers the switch powering your connection.

The power needed by a single network switch is next to nothing. Around 5-10W ish at most. The POE injector can provide upto 30W but whatever is at the other end won't be consuming much power most likely.

Roughly should add around 100 bucks to your power bill each month. Some might say it's wrong coz you are already paying for it. I say small amount to pay for much improved uptime. And it won't be needed once you upgrade to fiber.

I don't think the switch would be solely serving me in the whole area? So anyone from my area could have had this POE device installed to power the switch for everyone.

I don't care about the added electricity cost since it would be menial but would have appreciated if the LCO would have been more upfront. Also, initially the uptime was quite great but recently since I've shifted to the 100mbps plans, there have been random disconnects ranging from minutes to a couple of hours that are usually fixed on the same day.

it should be serving all the connections being powered by that switch. they try to put the poe thing on at least one of the connections from each switch. when i switched to fiber, they had to install it on another connection from the pole besides my place.

my linesman did tell me what the device was for and asked me if i was comfortable installing it on my connection.

sounds kinda risky to have all connections dependent on one customer

yup. they try to have backup. depends upon how cooperative people are. my experience with sify was shit so i used to turn off power supply when i used to go out just out of spite. with excitel, no real problem.

plus of course they do have their own supply coming on the entire ethernet network. the problem is that any hiccup at their end used to cause connectivity to drop. with this it doesn't though i imagine, it only works well if all switches on the route have similar poe connectors.

yup. they try to have backup. depends upon how cooperative people are. my experience with sify was shit so i used to turn off power supply when i used to go out just out of spite. with excitel, no real problem.

Click to expand...

I'm thinking about the same to try switching off the POE injector next time I get disconnected. Might finally get a call from the LCO (and finally get his new cell since the last one he switched off) instead of raising a ticket on excitel.

JB701 said:

sounds kinda risky to have all connections dependent on one customer

Click to expand...

Yes exactly, they might have backup poe injectors in other houses but I'm not too sure. Given the random disconnects, I'm thinking of upgrading my backup airtel bb to fibre (their installation is almost complete in my area) as I'm hoping that will not have much downtime.

POE will be used in more customer places for redundancy

UPDATE: There was another disconnect this morning, so the LCO came to visit and suggested to shift Excitel to fiber. Asked 500 for the wiring and installation got completed by evening.

The same plan is continuing and I don't see any different plans in My Excitel portal. Connection looks stable till now will post thread about the experience.

@FujiwaraTofu i guess its not excitel fiber or is it. Which onu he installed at ur place. Any security deposit he asked

Well I am still on REELTIME plans, but the connection is now fibre. How would I check if it is Excitel Fibre or not? If it is not does that even make a difference?

The ONU says "Sharp Vision Jumbo Tia AS111 EPON 1GE ONU" (Link), I'll add pictures later. I think it is a simple ONU (without wireless) that is in bridge mode. It only has a single input for the fibre cable and output for ethernet. Its output is connected to my router that is handling the PPPoE authentication and DHCP.

EDIT: No there was no security deposit, only the 500 for the installation charges.

It's your lcos own fiber and not excitel fiber.

One thing I don't understand, these lcos who are running their own fiber network, why don't they get excitel fiber. Like they already have the equipments

I see. What exactly would be different in Excitel Fiber though? I assume that only the LCO will deploy the excitel fiber too.