Quote:
Originally Posted by RWCable
P.S. guys I have an old news report about Milton Keynes and the Virgin/BT cabling dispute.
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Since you mention that situation, the old cable cabinet by our exit to the grid road happened to be open the other week, so I had a peek inside to see what was there (didn't touch, of course!)
There was a single yellow fibre optic cable entering a media converter labelled "MK-TV Spine" followed by the spine number. That box had a co-ax cable coming out of it, into a large amplifier and power injector. At the bottom of the cabinet, the two large coax cables had been physically cut. Presumably by BT when VM no longer renewed their lease in 2012 (or whatever happened). There's little to zero chance that network will be reconnected assuming Cityfibre do actually run FTTH in the whole town.
As for the encryption, as far as I remember, the vertical sync signal gets stripped out and placed somewhere in the teletext portion of the signal (vertical blanking interval) in some inverted form. Then, if the box is authorised to do so, it re-inserts the signal. The situation whereby a VHS recorder can't read the signal is named Macrovision, and I think it involves some similar trickery. I'd imagine the Jerrold/GI boxes would output a macrovision protected signal for VCRs.