I’m kinda surprised that your ISP was able to sell you a 1 Gbps service but didn’t bother to check if the line equipment was capable of that speed. Here in California, the ONT is considered the “demarcation point”, which is where the ISP’s responsibility ends and where the customer’s responsibility begins. So the ONT is owned and maintained by the ISP, although it often does require AC power from the customer’s home.

Just prior to when I upgraded from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, my ISP was already undertaking a network upgrade and that meant they were proactively upgrading customers to newer ONTs that would enable faster service. My understanding is that they had a newer fibre switch on their end, and upgraded customers would need the physical fibre moved from the old switch to the new switch. So to shrink the time where they are forced to operate two separate switches, they reached out to all the customers to replace their ONTs at once. I’m aware that some PON networks can run upgraded services simultaneously on the same fibre, but apparently my ISP doesn’t do that.

As a result, their equipment was already in place when I decided to jump to 1 Gbps. Rather embarrassingly, it was only then that I found that my home’s original CAT5(no E) wiring had two pairs taken for use with a former alarm system. And since 1 Gbps requires all four pairs, the ISP technician could show 1 Gbps at the demarc but not through my home wiring. On my own time, I reunited the missing two pairs and now have 1 Gbps link to the ONT.

In future, I plan to re-run that 30 meter link with CAT6, since my own testing indicated that the existing wiring is too marginal for 10 Gbps, or even the 802.3bz intermediate speeds of 2.5 Gbps or 5 Gbps. And I really do want to upgrade to 2 Gbps service, mostly to say that I have it…