The latter. The session negotiation is encrypted. You can technically shelve the unit after that’s been negotiated but it would need to be plugged back in each time your connection reset for some reason.
Yeah, I saw some setups doing that. It seems like too much hackery involving a very core piece of network hardware, which is something I’d prefer to avoid. Fortunately it wasn’t my connection so I could live easier with deciding to keep the ONT.
I dunno, if the new ONTs are as braindead as the old Residential Gateways, it's probably worthwhile, but sure, it's a little hacky. I also wonder if you can get a higher data rate using the transceiver directly; GPON is 2.5G down/1.25G up IIRC, where the ONT I used was limited to 1G ethernet (although maybe you could do bonding, but obviously AT&T wouldn't set that up)
