The term residential fiber to the premises (FTTP) refers to equipment used in fiber access deployments where fibers extend all the way to the end-user premises and the equipment is designed and optimized for use in residential applications. Equipment designed and optimized for fiber-to-the-business applications is not included — such equipment is included in the optical transport segment.

FTTP is further divided into point-to-point (PTP) FTTP and point-to-multipoint FTTP. PTP FTTP technologies are more expensive to deploy because of a higher fiber count, but have the advantage of offering a dedicated fiber to each end-user location, which makes it possible to share PTP infrastructure between different carriers. Very often, a PTP FTTP deployment has optical Ethernet switches both at the CO and the customer premises. Point-to-multipoint FTTP technology is commonly referred to as passive optical network (PON) technology. There are various types, including broadband PON (BPON), gigabit PON (GPON) and Ethernet PON (EPON). GPON is the most popular for large carriers, although there are significant EPON deployments in Asia/Pacific and Japan. The different types of PON are collectively called xPON.

FTTP, FTTH, fiber to the x (FTTx) and other similar terms are often used interchangeably in literature on this topic.