Hi

Looking for some advice please.

Our street has been cabled for UFB.  It has overhead power and telephone lines so the fibre has been strung along the poles and black boxes have been fitted to the poles.  The crew were also digging up the berm and there is now a black plastic marker at one of our boundaries, which I believe indicates a buried microduct for blowing fibre through. So it appears we may have the choice of an overhead or an underground installation.

When I emailed Chorus about it, they said: "Every house is different but we follow the path of where most utilities go for example, if your phone, power, gas are overhead, then fibre will very likely be overhead. You will know more when you place an order. If your lines are overhead, you can request an overhead to underground conversion through your provider."

Going overhead would be the easy choice but probably not a good long-term solution.  If we chose that, would the installers mount the ETP on the underside of the soffit, where the telephone line comes in, and run the fibre through the ceiling space to wherever we wanted the ONT and router?

If we chose to go underground, it wouldn't be a very long run -- about 3.5m along the berm from the marker to a point where it would head into the property, then only 2m to the garage wall but it would need to go under a block wall. I've seen some horror pictures of outside cable runs. Would it be best if I trenched under the wall myself beforehand, or would the installers do this okay?

Continuing the underground option, the ETP would mount on the outside of the garage wall.  And, as with the overhead option, we would want the ONT and router in the middle of the house but it might be a tricky run as we have a low profile roof and it would be a 20m run. Would it be better to split the ONT and the router, eg. to put the ONT in the garage and run my own ethernet cable to where I want the router in the middle of the house, rather than hoping the Chorus techs will run the fibre to the middle of house and not take any ugly shortcuts?

Finally, I read somewhere that if you have the choice of overhead or underground, they'll do overhead by default and you need to pay more for underground.  Is that true?

Thanks - Simon