Re: Will VM charge for damaged cable?
 

Unless you live in one of the areas where they have recently installed Fibre to the Home then yes all of the cables between your home and the cabinet are copper based.

The TV & Internet will be connected to a single Coax cable - similar to a TV aerial cable. Alongside this is a tube carrying standard copper pairs of cable for your phone service. This is why the overall cable looks like a figure of 8 if viewed end on.

This cable will terminate at the box outside and then usually the cables are split off and enter the building - the coax for TV / Internet and the phone cables to your telephone socket.

It is quite possible that the spade or whatever it was went into the cable side on and cut the phone cables completely and damaged the coax which would explain the partial service to TV & Internet, with a total loss of phone service.

Re: Will VM charge for damaged cable?
 

I think that's what must have happened. I'm not FTTP, so they will be copper then.

When it was first announced that NTL would be using fibre optic, I assumed that this was throughout as nobody mentioned that the last bit would be copper. I really don't know why they didn't just make all installations FTTP instead of penny pinching for the last tiny part of the network.

The cables have been down for nearly nineteen years, do they degrade over time? My internet seems to be a lot faster since they were replaced!

I remember when cable first started here and it was TV only. Then, phone lines were introduced. Surely they must have futureproofed their system and didn't have to pull a new cable throughout all their system?!

IIRC, cable had to wait for permission to be granted to be able to offer telephony, so maybe they took a gamble on it being granted and laid all the cables at the same time (which paid off).

Re: Will VM charge for damaged cable?
 

It’s fibre to the cabinet - it was considerably cheaper to lay copper to the junction to the homes.

Re: Will VM charge for damaged cable?
 

To be fair, decent co-ax has a lot of bandwidth in the region of a GHz. You can get a lot of data down that wire.

Re: Will VM charge for damaged cable?
 

Even though copper was cheaper (I don't know about these days as the price of metal has shot up and fibre optic may now have come down in price as it's years old now), I still don't understand the logic in not doing the last tiny part of the circuit in fibre too.

Won't the vast majority of the connection be from the headend to the cabinet with fibre and then they appear to have skimped on the last tiny part with copper :confused:

This must have an impact on the signal or people wouldn't be bothering to uograde to FTTP!?

Re: Will VM charge for damaged cable?
 

Until recently, fibre was far too expensive to provide for every customer. Using copper in the streets allowed one pair of fibres to be shared between dozens of homes.

Nowadays, laying fibre is cheaper than copper.

Re: Will VM charge for damaged cable?
 

You need to remember the majority of these networks were built 25-30 years ago. Ignore the telephony for now, but the original networks were just broadcast TV. Some of these networks were originally RF all the way from the headend, through multiple amplifiers in cascade. Meaning the further away you were from the headend, the worse your picture was. Then the next step was to overbuild with fibre (to the node). The cost of having a optical transmitter/receiver at each customer premises in those days would have far outweighed the revenue. Also the PON networks that we are seeing now I imagine we’re pretty much laboratory only, if even invented. The HFC network was tried and tested around the world. The cables are currently still holding their own, it’s the equipment all around it that has evolved. DOCSIS 3.1 when launched will be the big test, if they hit the speeds etc that are claimed, then I imagine HFC has got another 15+ years in it.

Re: Will VM charge for damaged cable?
 

Our part of the network is 23 years old.

Did the cable companies foresee things like telephone & broadband services and build them into their infrastructure, or were they only meant for television and the other services were tacked on?

How would they cope if they wanted to add another type of service?

Re: Will VM charge for damaged cable?
 

This probably answers some of your question:
https://www.cableforum.uk/board/showthread.php?t=6658

In regards to the technology itself, there has been a bit of good fortune in that cables designed for analogue TV have enough capacity to handle Digital TV and Broadband by replacing the kit on either end. DOCSIS was designed to take advantage of that good fortune and continues to do so.

Re: Will VM charge for damaged cable?
 

I believe some of the early franchises were TV only, phones added once licenses were available. Again, different area by area, some were built as 2 way networks, some were built as 1 way, some areas were easily adaptable, others not.

I would imagine going forward the majority of services will be IP based, so shouldn’t be any major cable changes needed. If it’s a different scenario I imagine VM would see if the sums add up as to if it’s a product the want to offer.

Re: Will VM charge for damaged cable?
 

Thanks for the interesting replies.

It really was a hotch potch of a network wasn't it. I think it would have been more sensible to have awarded one franchise for the whole of the UK, it wasn't as if customers could choose which cable company they wanted, so the idea of competition for dividing things up into franchise areas is moot.

It was lucky that a system designed for analogue had enough capacity for phone and broadband on top of TV. AIUI, TV is the least profitable part of the business, so if digital hadn't been invented, I suspect that most cable companies would have gone under.