Not to be That Guy, but RJ45 is a plug standard; normal ethernet cable is "cat5" or "cat6", and normal 10/100/1000 Ethernet is limited to just 100 meters. Which is completely useless given the average cabinet distances in the UK.
Though I suspect that most ELM is delivered over fibre and the CPE just presents a RJ45 fo ryou to plug your TOR Router into.
I mean, you still have some kind of consumer equipment there, which the ISP will likely be supplying for almost all users anyway – so that's quite a specific thing.
Despite the headline figures, G.fast will not achieve anything close to that.
And I have to say that all seems like a little short-term thinking. The fragility of fibre in a permanent installation is hardly a convincing argument.
If you are in a new building, without furniture and mess, fibre of course make sense. If you live in a Small Apartment, old making installation difficult, Fibre isn't so great. My guess is that the problem may be specific to cities.
Of course people who still have landlines nowdays probably have cordless ones that require a powered base station, but I assume that at least in the UK, the line must be left powered during power cuts.
I've never actually seen any ISP there even advertise a battery backup unit, I guess if you need they'll just tell you to buy a standard UPS.
No idea how it works in the UK, haven't had consumer-grade fibre here yet, always just got business-grade stuff where you bring your own hardware & UPS if needed.
I've installed (business) fibre links on 6 continents, handoff has always been a pair of fibres (usually LC or SC), usually with a /30 ipv4/ethernet, and a routed network pointing at my end of the handoff (or in the case of private peering, a BGP configuration)
My FTTH from BT is a single fibre (no idea if it's compatible with generic bidirectional sfps). This runs into an Openreach converter box - powered by a battery backup - which has 2 phone outputs and 4 rj45s.
My core mikrotik plugs into one of the rj45s and establishes a pppoe session with BT's network.
Given the rate at which people -- especially younger people -- are getting rid of landlines in the UK I suspect in the future this'll be a non-issue. To be honest I'm not sure why I have a landline still.
I’ve never actually had a landline on fiber ever. It was always just standard Ethernet on top of which I run whatever I want (SIP client or WiFi calling).
How was that “landline” working? Do they give you a little converter that turns Ethernet into a standard phone jack (and converts it to SIP internally), or is there some other non-IP based signaling for that voice traffic?
Copper Ethernet RJ45 is the best. No more modem, just plug and play. Installing a Ethernet cable is, assuming enough space in the pipe, can be easily pulled through using whatever force you like, I don't think you can actually do any damage to the cable while installing it.
The telephone wire, It is a little hard to imagine a home without these wires. ( May be there are parts of the world which don't have them a default? I don't know ). There is no need to do installing. It is Modem then plug and play. G.Fast A3 actually allows 212Mhz and Dynamic allocation of Upstream and Downstream bandwidth. And gets 300Mbps + for 300M from Cabinet, and 500Mbps or those within 200M.
I used to long for Fibre, but then when the installation comes, it either works perfectly in pipes that get pulled through, or you have to lay them out in the open and are warned they are extremely brittle. Which gets me a few phone call from friends getting nervous saying they would much rather stick with Cable or telephone wire with VDSL. Or in one case where she only has a 6M ADSL she just flat out cut the services and didn't want fibre's hassle. She is mostly on Mobile Phone anyway and her unlimited 4G plans is fast enough for what she needs. The only time she needs WiFi is when she is doing IOS update and that could be done in Office. And when the times Massive MIMO, 5G NG comes with high increase in capacity and speed. I can only imagine there will be more doing just that.
A lot of times we nerds, geeks, tech savvy enthusiast just wanted faster speed, cheaper, better tech whatever. Fibre allow us going to 10Gbps! ( Yes there are 10Gbps Internet services to Home ), without actually asking if or do the many user cares. Last mile is a hard problem, and I wish more thoughts will be put in design and installation parts.
Luckily we have people working on TerabitDSL, with spaces in between copper wires and using Waveguide-mode that is similar to use of millimeter-wave transmissions in 5G. [1]
[1] https://www.assia-inc.com/terabit-dsl/