Maybe on a massive development they will install brand new street cabinets, but anything smaller than a few hundred homes, copper is still the standard.
Street cabinets would be FTTC. The cabinet is full of electronics, for FFTC there's a full VDSL modem which is you can feel and hear a working FTTC cabinet, it gets hot, so it has cooling fans that spew warm air and makes a gentle buzzing noise.
For FTTP they can and do either just bury everything (in a city or where the cables are underground for tidiness) or hang it from a pole if there are telegraph poles in your area. Because there's very little of consequence near you, the smarts are all in an exchange building that might be a full day's walk from you rather than street cabinets typically just a few hundred metres from each property.
> anything smaller than a few hundred homes, copper is still the standard.
If you're building twenty properties the fibre is free if the builder asks. Nothing to pay, just so long as you get Openreach in at the start to ensure a viable deployment.
If you're building between two and nineteen properties it's cost sharing, the builder pays part of the extra install cost over copper for their smaller site.
We were looking to move recently and almost bought a house from a sub company of Persimmons (yeah, we pulled out after we found out they were involved), but the houses all had Fibre to the premises. Except the provider was a monopoly, and was owned by Persimmons. Apparently, you didn't eve get a BT line installed, and were completely stuck with this dodgy 3rd party provider for the life of the property. That and the quality of Persimmons workmanship was enough to make us walk away from what was actually a very "sweet" deal.
Half the time the roads aren't even maintained by the council, but there's no rebate on council tax.
But I have to admit this is a new one on me.
Depends on terrain for how easy it is to do.
I really like Ubiquiti products (e.g. Litebeam, Nanostation) because they are cheap, reliable, and have great features. They do need configuration, but I worked it out from Internet and YouTube when I did it.
We live on a relatively recent Persimmon estate but luckily OFNL got the contract; even that's a bit dodgy, all of the ISPs have crap websites and are a little dodgy looking (although the service has been alright).
And yeh, no BT line. It was an exclusive contract. OpenReach say they wont even install lines until the roads are adopted. Ironically, there is an independent Care Home built next door to us & OpenReach have been up and down the street and in our estate cabinet busy fitting their lines....