Cable underground
 

I think virgin media should seperator two cables under the ground eg:

fibre optic cable A : TV service only
fibre optic cable B : Broadband service only

and I do believe these two seperator cables will be even better for their network and less congestion on many UBR speed issues problem lately because they only had a single fibre optic cable underground for both tv and broadband.

Remember the past with telewest (only broadband) there is no problem and never had any single UBR problem in uk until virgin media take over and then sell as both broadband tv services and look what happen now ?? too many problem with tv and broadband ongoing.

Do you think two seperator cables will fix the problem easy ?

Re: Cable underground
 

I fear your understanding of the technology is not sufficient to be making such recommendations.

• The cables aren't the cause of capacity issues.
• Telewest have always offered cable TV and phone services.
• Areas of London formerly under the Telewest brand are some of the most crippled and under-invested in the country
• And finally, VM still have debts of about £5.5billion from the first lot of cables they laid!

Re: Cable underground
 

As noted above, the capacity of the cable is not the problem. It's the capacity of the hardware running it.

Also, Virgin have taken over nothing. NTL and Telewest merged, bought Virgin Mobile and licenced the Virgin name. It is, to a large extent, the old Telewest management who are running the company.

Also, as noted above, Telewest were not that good in investing in infrastructure. I have heard of several instances where customers complained about network problems only to be told that nothing would be done and they would be better off elsewhere.

The orginal construction of the cable network caused a LOT of disruption, so most local councils will be unlikely to allow it again.

Finally, bearing in mind that NTL went bankrupt owing £17 billion (which is mainly debt from the original cablecos building their networks) and had only cabled just over half the houses in the country, do you not think they would be better off building any new network in uncabled areas at the moment?

Re: Cable underground
 

The cables that connect your house to the UBR are not fibre they are copper coaxial. They existing cable are more than capable of providing 200meg+ broadband speeds (broadbandings will no doubt know the actual figure) Your knowledge of the network architecture is obviously limited as the bottlenecks are mostly at UBR level and are due to over-subscription, something that was a trait of both NTL and Telewest before the merger.

The underlying technology is very capable (even the legacy DOCSIS 1.0 network can provide faster speeds than is used) and the reason the network has issues is down to capacity.

Have a look at this picture to help yourself understand :-

https://www.cableforum.co.uk/images/local/2009/03/8.jpg

Impz

Re: Cable underground
 

Thinking about this what's the spec of the Co-axial cable from the end of the fibre to the cabinets and also the cabinets to the homes and finally from the splitter outside of the house to inside of the house??? Just wondering especially as I was discussing with my other half co-axial specs and attenuation figures for HF upto about 1.2Ghz (yep we do have some stimulating conversations in this house....ZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!!)

Re: Cable underground
 

Commscope cable is one manufactuer that has been used:

http://docs.commscope.com/Public/F660BE%20BW.pdf

Most if not all will be 5-1000Mhz. This includes the network Coax as well.

Also the splitters vary from the many suppliers to the cable industry over the years. But many will range from 5-1000Mhz some will range from 5-750Mhz The newer ones:

http://www.teletrend.ch/docs/Ecoline%20A41.pdf

The main issue will be the Amplifiers as most will be up to 750Mhz but again they will vary accross the country as will the upstream band this can be anything from 5-50mhz,5-40Mhz, 5-65Mhz.

But once the analogue is gone there is plenty of bandwidth the play with.

Re: Cable underground
 

The congestion issues are nothing at all to do with the capacity of the fibre between the nodes and hubsites / headends.

Without being rude I'd strongly suggest that you learn the technology - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Fibre_Coaxial

While you're at it I have no idea where you get that Telewest never had uBR problems, they had more than ntl did, and I have no idea where you had the idea that Telewest didn't sell TV pre-Virgin Media.

Either way the two are in no way related at all.

---------- Post added at 23:01 ---------- Previous post was at 22:59 ----------

The other minor issue is that even the newest modem VM have offers 204Mbit maximum downstream to however many people are sharing it, which at the moment is thousands to each bonded group.

Re: Cable underground
 

When we upgraded to Digital TV in 2000 NTL (or was it Cable & Wireless then) had to install a new cable back to the cabinet as the new digital box simply would not work even when the old analogue one did. This took about two weeks as we were told a special low loss cable due was needed due to the distance and this was on back order. Didn't cost us a penny.

For what its worth the old cable was brown, the new one was black !

Re: Cable underground
 

That must be what they mean by "dark fibre"..... ;)

Re: Cable underground