Even after BREXIT I guess the UK is technologically a bit closer to what we have here in Germany (especially with Unitymedia/Vodafone owning the cable network now).
We typically have three wired Internet choices in the EU, but perhaps not all choices everwhere:
- DSL using classic copper telefone lines into the house. Limited to 250/50 Mbit/s down/upstream by the unshielded wire and physics, but at least its last mile bandwidth tends to be exclusive. It tends to be shared (10Gbit fiber, typically) from the roadside concentrator to the POP. Phone DSL can include digital TV services via a set-top box and/or phone services, but today it's all IP based, analog and ISDN phone is dead. I still use one of those as a backup line and because the tax authorities require me to have a separate private line so I can deduct my fiber line as business expense.
- DSL using copper coax cables. Originally had unidirectional UHF analog TV on it, these days it's using cable modems and sophisticated frequency band management to turn a shared (non exclusive) high frequency medium into something digital and bidirectional. With sophisticated modems on both ends and not too many users sharing the last mile, it can achieve gigabit speeds with DOCSIS 3.0, but typically it's very asymetrical e.g 500/50Mbit/s down/up. Again, it may be bundled with phone and TV services, sometimes via IP based via a set-top box, sometimes via a cable digital TV receiver. That cable digital TV stuff is probably technically obsolete, even if it is much greener than IP based TV services (because it's still true broadcast and not 1:1 TCP/IP). But those IP based ones are soo much easier to use if TV were a thing for you. I used that as a primary for Internet before fiber became available.
- Optical fiber. Limited mostly by what's being put into the nearest aggregator POPs. In residential areas it's currently available up to 1 Gbit/s symmetrical if you pay an extortionist premium. It's an exclusive medium right to the POP and naturally symmetric, but they love to ask double price if you want the full upstream bandwidth... The physical medium easily supports 10Gbit/s and more so it's just a matter of paying for the POP upgrade if you want truly premium bandwidth. Phone and TV are all IP based bundles if you want them. I switched to them, because they gave me 1000/500Mbit/s for the price of 500/50 on coax cable (Bye Unitymedia/Vodafone, welcome some Canadian venture fund!)
#1 and #2 typically have the advantage of already being available from a socket inside your home. But they suffer from squeezing packets through exclusive or shared copper media from your home to the roadside concentrator, while digital fiber tends to bypass that bottleneck (and its energy expense of the modulation/amplification) going optical right to the POP.
Nobody has a fully exclusive distribution network so once you're at the residential POP (typically a couple of kilometers away), everybody shares backbone providers and networks. Yet those must be redudant enough, because I've never had both land lines down at the same time (the firewall will switch automatically). I'm close to Frankfurt and DE-CIX which isn't the worst place to be on the Internet.
I haven't used TV or radio in decades, but then I don't watch women's football, either.
I guess you're facing variant #2 and they'll bundle a matching cable modem, perhaps including a full firewall/access-point appliance with it, which will offer WIFI and Ethernet. In Germany for some reason that is almost always a Fritz!box. That is certainly the easiest, not necessarily the cheapest because they tend to charge extra for anything not a naked cable modem.
If you transfer from Down Under, perhaps getting something that just works is preferable. At least in the EU ISP contracts are down to one year maximum duration, so we're not indenturing for life any more.
If your concern were to be
using coax as an Ethernet replacement for within the house, that's where MoCa comes into play. I use it to bridge the gap between the Ethernet port on my fiber connection, which comes out in the attic and my appartment in the floor below. The building is 170 years old and there are no cable tunnels, but they did put in coax cables for a shared roof TV antenna 50 years ago. So I convert Gbit Ethernet from the fiber ONT via MoCa into (TV) coax in the attic and then use another MoCa modem to convert back to Ethernet from the former TV antenna socket in the living room. From there it goes into a professional firewall with access points and wired Ethernet behind that.
These MoCa cable modems are even available as 2.5 Gbit/s variants these days and up to 16 devices can share a COAX medium, so it works quiet well with shared TV coax cabling in houses with multiple tenants.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/goCoax-Eth...sprefix=gocoax+moca+2+5+adapter,aps,57&sr=8-3
It resembles old fat Ethernet in many ways with the MAUIs, coming to think of it...
Be aware that you'd need at least two such devices in a scenario like that, but I'm pretty sure your use case is more like #2.
I do stream a lot of 4k content with no problems.
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