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TrinCroft t1_jdvau71 wrote

To your edit, the apt office probably knows what is installed already, not what can be installed. I had them install it in an apt building I was in, everyone else had comcast. They did have to run wires though. They had to add a demarcation point (It was a box, it is where the line comes in to the building.)

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jayx468 OP t1_jdvc3q0 wrote

So fios needs specific wires to work? I remember having a black box at my old apt that had fios. I guess that was the demarcation point?

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TrinCroft t1_jdvcoht wrote

Fios is fiber optic. I am fairly certain Comcast is not. You can’t just hook your modem up to whatever is run into the apt and choose. And that box probably could have been the demarcation point? I don’t know. The two I have had installed weren’t that same color. It just needs to be run from the street to your building or at least just hooked up. Fios can tell you that you have it in your area but it may not be set up for your building yet.

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jayx468 OP t1_jdveqr5 wrote

I wish there was a way to check beforehand. :/

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GargantuanWitch t1_jdw097h wrote

If no one in your building has FiOS yet, and everyone's on Comcast, you likely have no fiber in your building, and everything is run via coax cabling (what you got HBO via in the 80s).

If you're seeing coax cable in your rooms, that's likely all you have, and it's suggesting that Comcast is what everyone else is using.

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KentuckYSnow t1_jdx316o wrote

For FiOS you need an optical network terminal and it's unique to you, and powered. The router hooks into that with Ethernet cable. If you see a coax terminal on the wall, it's Comcast.

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theidleidol t1_jdyis1g wrote

Every apartment I’ve lived in has had the ONTs in the basement of the building and data was carried to each unit via coax. In the one building they had the whole wall gridded out in the demarc room and when you started service Verizon came, mounted the ONT in your little Sharpie box, and swapped the coax over from the Comcast terminal block on the opposite wall to the coax terminal on the ONT.

I still have the FiOS gateway in a box (only have Comcast where I am now); if you don’t believe me I can take a photo of the back and probably also the instruction manual. IIRC there’s two coax connections, one for WAN and one for MoCA back out to your set top boxes.

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KentuckYSnow t1_je3pbkw wrote

And was all this in newer buildings? Because most stock in Pittsburgh is older than FiOS and wouldn't have been fitted out with fiber optic before Comcast wired it up with coax.

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theidleidol t1_je4wia8 wrote

I’m not sure your point. These were all older buildings, in the sense that they were built before fiber to the home became a thing. That’s basically every housing unit in Pittsburgh, as you say. Though even many brand new buildings simply aren’t running fiber to the unit, and even fewer have Cat5/6 from the demarc

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