"Fiber to the Building" (FTTB) refers to installing optical fiber from the telephone company central office to a specific building such as a business or apartment house.
"Fiber to the Curb" (FTTC) refers to the installation and use of optical fiber cable directly to the curbs near homes or any business environment as a replacement for "plain old telephone service" (POTS) Fiber to the curb implies that coaxial cable or another medium might carry the signals the very short distance between the curb and the user inside the home or business.
"Fiber to the Home" (FTTH) is a network technology that deploys fiber optic cable directly to the home or business to deliver voice, video and data services. By leveraging the extremely high bandwidth capacity of fiber, FTTH can deliver more bandwidth capacity than competing copper-based technologies such as twisted pair, HFC and xDSL.
Fiber to the home is deployed in two primary architectures - point-to-point and passive optical network (PON). While both have their place in solving the last-mile bottleneck, a point-to-point architecture is generally deployed to businesses in metro and urban areas, while a PON is a more cost-effective solution for small- to medium-sized businesses and residences. A PON architecture allows a single fiber from the central office (CO) or headend to be split up to 32 ways, delivering high-bandwidth converged services to multiple residences or businesses, using a single optical transceiver in the CO. In a point-to-point configuration, an optical transceiver for each subscriber is required in the CO, thus substantially increasing the total cost of deployment.
"Fiber to the neighborhood" (FTTN) refers to installing it generally to all curbs or buildings in a neighborhood. Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) is an example of a distribution concept in which optical fiber is used as the backbone medium in a given environment and coaxial cable is used between the backbone and individual users (such as those in a small corporation or a college environment).
