When you order fiber service, two things happen: a crew builds a drop — the final cable from the street to your home — and a technician mounts an ONT (the box that turns light into internet) and connects your router. Most installs take two to four hours; the drop sometimes comes days earlier as its own visit.
The drop: buried or aerial
If your neighborhood's utilities are underground, the drop is too: a small machine or hand crew places the cable from the street terminal to your foundation, usually a shallow bore or narrow slit across the yard, flagged beforehand by 811 locates. If your power and phone arrive on poles, the fiber drop is lashed overhead the same way.
Temporary surprise worth knowing: some builds lay the drop on the grass for a week or two before burial — a scheduled burial crew follows. It looks forgotten; it usually isn't.
Inside the house: ONT, router, and one important question
The technician mounts the ONT where the drop enters — garage, closet, utility room, or outside wall — then connects your router (theirs or yours) and proves the speed. The question to answer before they arrive: where do you want it? The best spot balances where the cable can enter with where Wi-Fi needs to be strongest; central beats far-corner every time.
Ask for a battery backup or plan your own UPS if you keep phone service on fiber: the glass carries no power, so the ONT needs electricity to work through an outage.
How to prepare, and what good looks like
Before: know your sprinkler and private-line locations to point out, clear access to the entry point, and decide router placement. During: a good tech explains the route, drills one clean penetration, and labels what they leave. After: you should see the speed you bought on a wired test, a tidy mount, and restored ground outside. The companies building networks at scale — including us — live and die by how this last hundred feet feels to the homeowner.