OpenWrt gets first GPON support on EcoNet EN7528 ONTs

OpenWrt is gaining its first native GPON ONT path. Contributor AKoo7 has put forward draft EcoNet EN7528 xPON support that brings up a full fiber WAN on real ISP lines, including a DASAN H660GM-A and a JioFiber JCOW407 board package.

The work centers on a kernel xPON MAC and optical front-end driver plus a new userspace OMCI daemon that answers the OLT, maintains the MIB, and programs the datapath. ONU serial, PLOAM password, and WAN MAC come from UCI at runtime so the module stays unloaded until provisioned, and a small LuCI app exposes GPON and OMCI status. The stack replaces the vendor’s non-redistributable OMCI binary.

On a live DASAN unit the driver reaches GPON O5, completes OMCI provisioning, and carries full internet with netifd-managed PPPoE and NAT. Bench and field reports show stable DHCP and PPPoE with hardware offload; related EN7523 testing has posted roughly 180 Mbit/s reverse and up to about 750 Mbit/s bidirectional under offload.

A practical OLT compatibility detail also surfaced. Some Nokia and DZS OLTs only create the data GEM after MIB upload returns complete Priority-Queue and Traffic-Scheduler instances with real queue, scheduler, and T-CONT linkage. Thin defaults leave the ONU in O5 with management only and no upstream data path, so a generic OMCI agent must seed those hardware MEs fully before the OLT talks.

Parallel EcoNet work is advancing bootloader chainloading, Ethernet and SPI-NAND bring-up, and other EN75xx boards such as a TP-Link Archer VR2100 on EN7516 with working radios. Maintainers are still weighing how much OMCI logic should stay in-kernel versus userspace and want recorded OLT traces as a regression corpus, but the immediate result is clear: OpenWrt can now terminate GPON on EcoNet silicon without the stock firmware blob.