No 'even' about Hull - it has always been quite progressive, and was a keen independent actor, being as far as I know the only City in the UK to be connected to but not part of the GPO network from the early days, then later as Kingston Telecom, not part of BT.
Apart from having different coloured phone boxes, they were very early adopters of the dial telephones - no more 'number please' in Hull at a time when when the rest of the UK was still on switchboards. Not too surprised to see full fibre, even if the city is no longer riding the wave of fish money.
But in any case the plan has all the copper de-enegised in a couple of years. Not sure how that works for places with a phone but no mains power.
When fibre to the home was first mooted, the idea was there would be an internal battery able to make emergency calls for a few hours, but this has fallen by the wayside as the full bandwidth internet solution is just too current hungry.
And of course the mobile base stations have the same problem, and generally fall over ni a power cut, it not immediately then after an hour or so - legally they do hot have to be backed up.
Also I suspect that there will be a lot more moaning in future when builders cut the fibre than there is now when they slice a bit of twisted copper, as the effort to do a splice in the field is rather more involved.
