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Comment by devit | Hacker News Reader

At least in some European countries fiber goes to a GPON terminal in the apartment and then proceeds via Ethernet cable to the home router.

I'd guess the co-ax cable is probably a US-only practice.

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I was speaking from a UK perspective which, as another commenter says, is mostly co-ax from a point on the pavement. 'Actual' FTTP is coming in now, like HyperOptic, starting with apartment blocks where they can get lots of customers per one new civil engineering job. Most consumer telecoms fibre networks in the UK were laid in the 90s and don't go right to the home.

If you're in the lucky situation of having true FTTP, then it's still very unlikely such fibre could be used as a 'microphone' because of the sensitivity and spatial resolution issues. It would also be pretty obvious it was being used because it would probably interfere unless they were very careful with bands. So don't worry, DAS isn't going to be used to listen to your voice. Much easier to do that with your phone!

In the US it’s not called fiber if there’s coaxial in the line. If that were true everybody with a cable modem would essentially have fiber.

> In the US it’s not called fiber if there’s coaxial in the line

My FIOS ONT has a coax out, so that's probably not entirely true.

Yeh that seems to basically be what we call fiber in the UK!

When I lived in Chattanooga back in 2011, the Electric Power Board offered fiber to the home with an offer of a Gigabyte up and down---hence the original use of Gig city for Chattanooga. I think this was even before Google showcased fiber to the home (was it in Oklahoma City at first? I don't recall)

We had to have a router with a fiber port to connect, then Ethernet via cat 5 or WiFi.

By the same principle it should be possible to listen to reflections of the signal propagating in the Ethernet cable that external vibrations introduce. But I guess the noise in the cable is much greater and the frequency of the signal is like 6 order of magnitude smaller making this mostly theoretical.

Virgin Media (UK) use coax. There are some FTTP installs (with coax to the router), but most, as far as I'm aware, use coax for the last leg to the house and from the wall to the router.

I've just had BT FTTP installed, and have a fibre coming into the building. They use GPON. It's wired into a modem ("Optical Network Terminal") that Openreach provide, which then presents the connection via cat5. You then plug your router in, which then uses PPPoE to establish the connection.

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