abelian covers of finite volume hyperbolic manifolds are ubiquitous. we will discuss ergodic properties of the geodesic flow/ frame flow on such spaces. in particular, we will discuss the local mixing property of the geodesic flow/ frame flow, which we introduce to substitute the well-known strong mixing property in infinite volume setting. we will also discuss applications to measure classification problems and to counting and equidistribution problems. part of the talk is based on the joint work with hee oh.