In the UK the largest cable provider, Virgin Media (owned by Liberty Global), is transitioning to fibre. I do not think there is much future for copper cables other than for short distances (which I class as within a building), or for non-broadband applications such as alarm pairs.
I think the current improvements we are seeing are less about copper competing against fiber and more about avoiding digging up the ground again to install fiber optic vs just using existing copper and upgrading the backbone instead.
