[toast0]

When AT&T did a fiber overlay in San Jose (GPON), they had neighborhood cables that were factory terminated to go from wherever to each pole. The linemen had to setup the pulleys? and pull the cable through, and attach them, but they didn't have to terminate them. When they ran a line to my house, they did do a field termination, but it seemed like they had a tool and it went quickly (mine was the tech's first time, or at least pretty early, but it only took a minute or so).

Of course, for repair work, if a tree or something breaks a multi fiber bundle, splicing is going to be a lot harder than coax. Probably harder than traditional phone lines, but I think PON is setup so that you don't need to care which wire connects to which other wire, and if you do that for end-user traditional phone lines, you'll have a big mess, so you'd really want to match the wires up before you junction them. Coax is just one big wire, so way simpler.