They are so protective because it is their way to "lock" you in, to protect their investment. Whom ever deployed the fiber in an area, owns the area. No one else can play, unless MORE fiber is put into the ground (which is unlikely as municipalities are very unlikely to allow the same area to be trenched multiple times, and those with ducts in the ground don't play fairly and lease ducts like they are supposed to).
That's why I personally find these "open access" terms laughable, at best. Open your network up right up to Layer 1 (yes, lease me, the ISP, the actual dark fiber into your home), and THEN you can start to call your network open access
Now, FTTH players using GPON can never do that due to the splitters involved, hence, their networks will never, ever be truly open access - the GPON provider will ALWAYS be involved, and they will ALWAYS dictate as to what can, and can not, be done in terms of service delivery. So much for competition, as my competitor now must dictate to me, their competition, what I can and can not do. Partially, the fiber owner is already fixing the prices in that they are dictating minimum costs to other ISPs for resale...
What is happening in terms of GPON deployments, is that they are creating hundreds of small little isolated "islands" of fiber... No interoperability, no interexchageability. A fixed, isolated, static network.
The Fiber port (to the provider) is generally a trunk, and then there would be one ethernet port (you'll need to find out which one) which is a access port (to the consumer), designated to the data vlan. If you use a seperate modem/router plugged into the correct port on the ONT, you shouldn't need to worry about VLANs and what not. It should be just as simple as to connect and fire up the PPPoE session.
What what I've seen in the past overseas, the ONT's has multiple ports, and each port is dedicated to one service (i.e. one for data, one for voip, one for iptv, etc). The providers generally configure the units like that so that you don't need to worry about the vlans and what not. Traffic going in on ether1 is encapsulated by the correct vlan id on the ONT, and passed to the provider through the fiber port.
EDIT: I think what the fiber provider meant to say is that the fiber provider authenticates the ONT via MAC address (i.e. is the ONT permitted to connect to the network - similar to what you do with wireless devices in a WISP network), and once the ONT connects, it sets up encryption, vlans, and all those other nice thingies. The ISP (ala AH, CrystalWeb, etc), most definitely would use usernames / passwords for PPPoE authentication I believe. But, EDIT 2, I also know that there are a few ISPs that do not use usernames / passwords, so I guess it's up to what ever the ISP decides to do.
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