Cloning the MAC unfortunately didn't work, I don't know if its the ONT or my OpenWRT router, but when the MAC address of my router's WAN interface matched with any of the MAC addresses of the ONT's interfaces (there are multiple), not necessarily the main interface, but even any of the WAN interfaces, it just didn't work, I couldn't even ping the ONT.
I tried to change the ONT's WAN interface MAC addresses, but unfortunately didn't work. 🙁 I might just need to get the MAC address binding reset from BSNL's side.
Anybody tried the annual plan cash back offer? For annual plans, we anyway need to pay only for 10 months, plus we get 25% cash back.
The cash back would be exclusive of GST, so if you opt for the 500 GB annual plan, I think it will come to
Rs 777 * 10 ie Rs 7770 + GST = Rs 9168 plus a cash back of Rs 1942 which would cover for 2 months including GST.
So it comes down to pay for 10 months, get service for 14 months ie Rs 655 per month incl GST as compared to Rs 916 pm for monthly payments.
So I've been noticing something interesting since I added monitoring to detect when the internet goes down. (I use Cron Monitoring - Get Alerts When Your Cron Jobs Fail | Healthchecks.io)
Every day between 12 AM to 1 AM, the PPP link drops exactly twice. The timing isn't fixed, but it happens within this one hour, maybe a few minutes here and there. It reconnects quickly within a minute or so. I wonder if its some daily reboot or something, but then the lack of a fixed timing puzzles me. The logs confirm that the PPP link errors out and it indeed reconnects. Will need to do some digging to see if its my LCO's OLT that gets restarted or if its BSNL's PPPoE authentication server which gets restarted or something.
(To the obvious question as to how the failure notification gets sent, I have a backup WAN (Jio 4G) so when BSNL goes down, it fails over to that, which you can notice from the IP address sending the failure notification)
So I added more data to the health check pings, it scrapes the ONT web interface and gathers the optical power, link status etc and sends it along with the health check ping.
From this I think it's the LCO's OLT device which loses power or some device in between which resets. I'll monitor for some more days and reach out to the LCO, it definitely helps when you have hard data to show that the link was down. 😀