Thanks for your reply. It does seem awfully quiet around here these
days. Essentially the situation is that out in inaka-ville nobody
offers fiber service. We had to get hundreds of people together to
sign multi-year contracts just to convince NTT to put in a few ADSL
multiplexers a few years back. Fiber? They just laughed. But what's
happened is that the national government is apparently offering grants
to various cities for improvements in communication infrastructure, so
then the cable company sales guys come along and with a package
offering as little as possible for exactly the amount of the grants.
From the bureaucrats' point of view it's a no-lose situation:
something for nothing, so they just accept whatever the cable
companies offer. But of course it's tax money, and we'll be paying for
it soon enough.

As for the speaker unit, it turns out it's made by NEC and is part of
a system for just this purpose. From a security and privacy point of
view, it's a nightmare. The box is apparently administered by the city
government, and the idea is that all of the voice and data traffic in
and out of your home goes through it, so in principle (not sure what
kind of interface they're given -- it's not disclosed) they would have
access to everything. So... no.

But we probably will go along with the fiber because, once people
start cancelling their ADSL contracts to move to fiber-based Internet
services, there's a risk that NTT will cancel ADSL services. So we
figure we'll put the fiber in, but leave it dark for now.

M