At the low end, the telephone system is star shaped, with all the local loops in a neighborhood converging on an end office. In contrast, cable television consists of a single long cable snaking its way past all the houses in the same neighborhood. Suppose that a future TV cable were 10-Gbps fiber instead of copper. Could it be used to simulate the telephone model of everybody having their own private line to the end office? If so, how many one-telephone houses could be hooked up to a single fiber?