We currently have Virgin Media but due to the recent price rise I’m thinking of swapping provider. We can get fibre to the home from BT. We have the choice of normal 18 mbps or superfast broadband, nothing in between.
My sister has fibre to the home and having seen the install I’m having second thoughts. Seems the standard install is 3 router sized boxes (ONT, modem and router)? Virgin Media is the router and that’s it.

Not sure where we’d actually put all of the equipment in our house…..

Is BT (or other providers equipment) likely to be the 3 boxes still? My sister’s install was a while ago

A bt fttp install now is a small splice point on the outside of your house. A ont is fitted inside about 100mm square with is patched to a bt homehub on the wan port.

And you don’t need the homehub – you can just put your own choice of router/hub in place as long as it’ll do PPPoE – which everything seems to do.

I’ve got a half decent Netgear Wifi router connected direct to the ONT (no modem/BT crap). You can attach whatever you need to it (mesh wifi boxes etc).

Have you phoned virgin and asked for it to be cheaper? Mine came down from about £50 to about £30 a month by doing that after a recent rise

So this isn’t normal?

I will ask VM what price they can do for a new contract too

So this isn’t normal?

That’s what I’ve got, minus the big cabinet. Mine are tucked away low down behind a table, I’m sure that openreach can bring the cable to wherever you want, within reason, so can put the two white boxes into a cupboard somewhere if you have one, provided you can supply power.

Being able to play off VM and BT puts you in a reasonable position – very few ISPs will take on a FTTH customer if you want to leave BT.

Seems the small box is a battery backup unit. Means you can still use your phone line for a while, if you have a power cut.
Apparently Openreach are going to stop supplying these as standard. https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2018/10/openreach-to-stop-providing-battery-backup-for-fttp-broadband.html
And the latest version of the ONT is a bit smaller. https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2019/09/a-look-at-openreachs-compact-fttp-broadband-ont-and-mini-olt.html

That’s the older way in new builds now it’s just a smaller version of ont (one on the left) stopped fitting battery back up a few months ago.

Thanks, that new ONT looks a lot better and battery backup is only useful if your house phone doesn’t need power anyway.

Our house is fairly new (2015). Apparently the street was built wired for BT fibre but does that mean an optical cable will have been run to my house already (if so I’m not sure where it is) or is it likely that there has been a conduit run that can carry the optical cable to/from the street?

The VM cable was preinstalled and runs to the lounge at the back of the house. It runs somewhere under the floor I think…definitely doesn’t run externally around the house