If YouFibre don't use the Openreach ONT, they won't use the Openreach cable.

YouFibre won't touch anything to do with OR. In fact, they'll leave all of the existing cabling in place and install alongside, including any overhead run from a pole that might be required.

Whether or not they'll run it the same route as the OR ONT is going to be down to the engineers on the day. I would certainly be stocking up on premium coffee and biscuits and do your very best to sweet-talking them into mirroring the existing install!

I've got something similar to do for my own install next week - my existing master socket is in the centre of the house, so it'll need the fibre to run under the floor. There's a large void there and I'll be more than happy to go down there for them to drag it under from the entry point at the front of the house. Hopefully this combined with the finest biscuits Aldi sell will avoid any difficulties!

maybe worth if theres space to put some conduit there and save some time in the future

Honestly, it's just a big open void and a right old mess under there so it would be very much "polishing a turd" were I do put trunking in for this. Only a quick job to go under there myself and drag it through.

Now that my own install is complete, I can add a few notes here:

The engineer was willing to put the ONT more or less anywhere I wanted, but did point out that because fibre can't be bent like copper can, it's much harder to run round neatly around corners which makes it harder to do an invisible install beyond drilling through an outside wall.

In the end, he left me with a roll of fibre and I ran it myself under the floor void (their engineers are not allowed to enter floor voids and lofts) and drilled a new cable access hole at the front of the house to bring it out to where the external fibre came down to. Whole job took me an hour (including the time taken to get the cat out from under the floor afterwards!) and made life much easier for the engineer when he came back later to complete the job. If you have very specific requirements and are happier to do this yourself, I would recommend having a chat with the engineer to see if this would be mutually convenient.

Can't report on the service yet as still waiting for activation - mine is the first install on a new exchange and apparently it's not /quite/ ready yet but should be very soon - maybe even today! I don't mind waiting, so this isn't a big problem for me.

In reply to a post by daern:

If you have very specific requirements and are happier to do this yourself, I would recommend having a chat with the engineer to see if this would be mutually convenient.

Thank you for your post.

That is what I have been hoping to do when Openreach FTTP becomes available.

Eero routers are designed to be used as a mesh network. Using one by itself would lose all the benefits of the product.

You can buy extra routers rather than paying a monthly fee.

If you're swapping kit from theirs to your own, just turn the ONT off, swap the router out and turn the ONT on again. It'll re-acquire a lease and start working there and then, rather than needing to wait an hour or phone CS.

You can also clone the MAC of the originally connected device if the above fails and you're impatient, but beware the EEro box doesnt have the MAC address listed so you'll need to grab it from the advanced settings in the EEro app before you go disconnecting anything. IIRC it also doesnt do a good job telling you which is the one in use for the wan side, so you might need to guess when spoofing it from the 2 listed.

Interestingly, I wasn't given the Eero, but instead a big black router thing which I gathered was more powerful. It's an Arris NVG578LX, I think made by Commscope.

Makes no difference to me as it'll get chucked in the box once the service is actually turned on (Wednesday, apparently!)

In reply to a post by daern:

Interestingly, I wasn't given the Eero, but instead a big black router thing which I gathered was more powerful. It's an Arris NVG578LX, I think made by Commscope. Makes no difference to me as it'll get chucked in the box once the service is actually turned on (Wednesday, apparently!)

That Arris box has GPON fibre interface. It sounds like it IS the ONT, perhaps not wall mounted as they've supplied an integrated ONT & Router in one? You may have to see if it can be put in a "modem mode" or similar.