Tenda TES7008 — 8-Port GPON OLT

Buying it, and when not to

The TES7008 is an 8-port GPON OLT - the head end of a fibre network, not customer equipment. Each of the eight PON ports drives a splitter tree, so one chassis can serve a few hundred subscribers depending on how you split. This is the box that lives in your core rack and makes you an operator rather than a reseller.

Buy it when subscriber growth has outrun your existing head end, or when you are building out an estate, a market block or a street network and intend to own the infrastructure. Eight ports also buys resilience: you can keep ports in reserve for new splitter runs instead of re-engineering a crowded one every time a customer signs.

It is the wrong first purchase for a small deployment. If you are proving a concept on one street, the single-port TES7001 or 2-port TES7002 is a fraction of the price and upgrades cleanly when the subscriber count justifies it. Remember also that the OLT is only part of the bill: budget SFP transceivers such as the TM5 for each PON port, splitters, the fibre itself, and an ONT or ONU for every subscriber. An OLT with no transceivers is a very expensive paperweight.