Moving from Virgin to EE - Third Party Router

I am thinking of moving from Virgin to a EE Full Fibre Plan, in part because of their current deal on the 900Mbps package (£38.99
£38.99/month, from 31 Mar 2026 £41.99/month, from 31 Mar 2027 £44.99/month) which is much cheaper what I pay for my 500 Mbps Virgin plan.

I am concerned however whether my OpenWRT router will work behind the EE modem and it seems that EE don't offer a static IP address (even if I am willing to pay extra?)

From the following article (https://ee.co.uk/help/broadband/getting-started/using-and-configuring-a-third-party-router), it seems it is possible to use a third party modem, however it would be great if anyone has any experience they could share (positives, negatives) - before I make the switch.

I've got the 500Mb EE fibre package and have used an Eero router plugged into the OpenReach ONT. Worked fine.

For Full Fibre you will need to use the Openreach ONT, but you are free to use your own router connected to the Ethernet port of that, as per the instructions on the page you found.

I've a Ubiquiti Dream Machine running on EE Full Fibre (900Mb) with no issues, when I moved from BT it didn't even reconnect as the underlying network is the same.

As you say you cannot have a static IP with EE, my IPv4 address changes from time to time but my IPv6 seems to remain constant.

What you can't officially do is replace the Openreach ONT, some people have tried this but it is not permitted and could cause issues for you and other customers on the same PON.

Should be totally fine with your OpenWRT box. Third-party router connections are very straightforward; it’s simply a PPPoE connection. The IP address won’t change as long as your router doesn’t drop the PPPoE connection. This could be months at an end.

On a faster connection (above 1 Gbps) look for a third party router that has hardware-offload / acceleration for PPPoE such as one of the MikroTik boxes or indeed the new Ubiquiti UCG-Fiber is an impressive bit of kit that will easily handle multiple 10G WAN and LAN connections for a handy price if you want to try something different.

Edited by Pheasant (Thu 12-Jun-25 21:01:20)