Why is VM Broadband different?

[Terry]

 I recall the rough and ready but very speedy way that the cables were laid - by BT standards very flaky - using lots of flimsy looking American kit. 

Flimsy? Although I've worked in the Cambridge headend on many occasions I've never seen their external plant but I've never seen a bit of 'flimsy' American kit anywhere!

The UK cable network is unusual in that the government granted licences on the basis of all cables being installed underground with the plant in roadside cabinets. Thus VM's network has cables in underground ducts in vast areas where BT are still using wooden poles and overhead wiring.

Elsewhere, equipment does not have the luxury of the protection of a street cabinet, being virtually all mounted overhead and exposed to the elements. Flimsy kit does not survive in such conditions! This applies equally to Europe and the US and, I suppose, everywhere else that has cable TV.

In the US, virtually all kit is mounted on utility poles or catenary wires between them - particularly taps and splitters, although amplifier casings usually also have provision for wire mounting. Obviously, all kit has to be weatherproof and one of the first things I noticed about the particularly large Scientific Atlanta amplifiers I first worked on was the hiss of escaping air you often heard when you unscrewed the cap which gave access to the internal test points - particularly so if the case had last been opened in very cold conditions as the trapped air could expand quite a lot as the amplifier reached normal operating temperature.

One aspect of the Cambridge build that caught us out was the unusual 19" cabinets - there was no obvious way of mounting shelves in them! As the routers we were installing were extremely heavy, they couldn't just rely on front mounting to the normal cage nuts - even if you could have held the weight steady enough to get the bolts in in the first place! 

When we asked the local staff what the secret was they provided some small but heavy duty brackets bent in such a way that the fitted slots in the side of the cabinet. Four of these were plenty strong enough to support the routers without any additional support.

Another Cambridge oddity was the use of plastic street cabinets! I have since seen a few of the smaller size plastic tap cabinets in the Lincoln area so Diamond Cable also used them.

[Mike Watterson]

Here in Ireland, NTL and Chorus strung coax along soffits and slung sometimes between houses without a support wire. Chorus put coax in a slot in the tarmac In Cork city in one area (without Council knowledge) and filled with tar. Years later the council was resurfacing with machine. The surface scrapped off gets recycled.
1) Everyone complains to UPC/Virgin about no TV or BB.
2) Council fines UPC (as they "inherited" Chorus liabilities by buying them) for illegally laying cables and thus contamination such that the scraped off surface can't be recycled.

Oops!
Chorus Analogue used ghastly Jerrold cable boxes originally and when changeing their badly engineered 2.5 GHz MMDS from AM Analogue (not FM!) to Digital used DVB-T with too poor a signal. So less channels and frequent freezing compared to NTL MMDS which used better engineered links, signal margin and eventually DVB-c for MMDS Digital.
When UPC bought both outfits and upgraded to PVR and HFC on cable they had to replace a lot of cable that could barely do 560MHz, never mind 750MHz or 862MHz. Some areas only used up to 460MHz for cable and some areas had the cable simply fed from MMDS downconverter (175MHz to 375MHz).
UPC wanted to use DOCSIS on the MMDS (Such systems do exist) back in 2007, but Comreg (Irish equiv. to Ofcom), wouldn't licence it. So the Rural people had no BB. The Ex-Chorus rural folk (DVB-T MMDS) had no PVR either, though the ex NTL MMDS folk got the regular cable TV PVR. The MMDS mesh dish has the downconverter to VHF/Hyperbband on it powered by 12V or 18V up the coax, depending on model.
Then recently the MMDS was turned off. The 2.5GHz to 2.7GHz spectrum (later reduced to only 100MHz) was awarded to Chorus and NTL originally in violation of ITU and European designations, it should have been 3.5GHz. The spectrum will will soon be auctioned for LTE (4G) Mobile, as in the rest of Europe and UK.

The UK cable was originally different operators, inc NTL who is now Arqiva. It's amazing the problems that companies inherit. The UK Virgin Cable is only branding, like recently rebranded Irish Virgin (which has only just recently rebranded to UPC with the Dutch Tulip logo), is really UPC, which isn't really Dutch as it's owned by USA Liberty Global.

So yes, there was a LOAD of flimsy & rubbish USA kit in Ireland on Cable. RTE had originally owned a lot of what NTL bought in Dublin. The Government forced RTE to divest.
Casey Cable is still indepenent in Waterford, first broadband in Ireland and first with HFC ultra fast gigabit with no cap. I think there might still be a small cable company in Longford.

Originally all the MMDS & Cable and so called "Deflectors" (private UHF retransmission of 2 to 5 channels!) paid no royalty, nor asked permission. Free to Air is NOT Free to Carry! Then Government brought in a law in response to TV sans Frontieres etc forcing everyone (inc NTL & Chorus!) to negotiate with the UK and pay royalties. By then NTL & Chorus were paying the Pay TV channel providers based on number of subscribers. The FTA UK channels are actually a reasonable flat rate royalty based on geographic coverage. Dutch Cable carries some UK FTA channels.
BBC World TV is Free To Carry, but you have to have permission.
You can't put your own local adverts in! A Limerick Radio station was retransmitting Channel 5 and doing local "opt outs". So lost retransmission licence. They also maybe the only Irish Radio station to lose the Radio licence too! Their radio content was on Satellite for a while after the terrestrial licence taken over.

[Terry]

Here in Ireland, NTL and Chorus strung coax along soffits and slung sometimes between houses without a support wire.

It can be difficult to spot the difference between an underground cable and one intended for aerial distribution as the later has an integral steel messenger wire:

Viewed from the ground I think the messenger wire could be difficult to spot.

The inside diameter of the outer conductor of this cable is half an inch and the loss is ~6dB per 100 metres @ 550MHz.

The maximum frequency of a network is often dependent on its age as amplifier technology has improved over the years. The Belgian networks of the mid 70s, for example,  were limited to 300MHz whilst early UK networks, being that much later, went up to 450MHz.

By the 90s this had increased to 550MHz and shortly afterwards to 600MHz which had more than adequate capacity for the analogue services at the time.

When digital TV started the muxes were slotted into gaps in the existing analogue service but, of courser, as the number of muxes expanded and broadband internet increased the demands on available bandwidth, an upgrade was called for.

By this time, my company, Encom, later Bell Cablemedia and subsequently Cable & Wireless Communications, was using amplifiers with a bandwidth extending up to 865MHz but there was still a huge lot of 600MHz or less networks to be considered. By now we had become ntl: so we were looking at about half the UK cable network as would have been Telewest.

Upgrades are expensive, no matter how hard you try to avoid it but ntl: adopted a strategy of upgrading to 750MHz as the extra cable losses at this frequency meant that very little cabling would need to be upgraded - just a lot of new amplifiers had to be installed.

Now, of course, all the analogue services have gone, leaving a clear field for digital.

The forward path now covers 85 - 750MHz which, if the entire spectrum was used, would enable 83  8MHz muxes to be carried.

[Mike Watterson]

Here in Ireland, NTL and Chorus strung coax along soffits and slung sometimes between houses without a support wire.

It can be difficult to spot the difference between an underground cable and one intended for aerial distribution as the later has an integral steel messenger wire:

Viewed from the ground I think the messenger wire could be difficult to spot.

Trust me, I've handled the coax. No steel wire in many cases, just the same trunk cable as along the sofit. You'd not believe it!
UPC was working madly last 10 years, since 2006 when they completely took over Chorus and NTL and merged them.

They replaced a huge amount of cable and fixed many dodgy installs.  Sadly I'm 6km away from nearest cable.

[colly0410]

What an interesting thread. Thanks for posting..

[Hartley118]

 I recall the rough and ready but very speedy way that the cables were laid - by BT standards very flaky - using lots of flimsy looking American kit. 

Flimsy? Although I've worked in the Cambridge headend on many occasions I've never seen their external plant but I've never seen a bit of 'flimsy' American kit anywhere!.....................

...........Another Cambridge oddity was the use of plastic street cabinets! I have since seen a few of the smaller size plastic tap cabinets in the Lincoln area so Diamond Cable also used them.

I guess that it's those plastic street cabinets that are the flimsiest part of the Virgin infrastructure. They're vulnerable to vandalism and I've even seen them with wires hanging out!

The cheap junction boxes on houses are also unfit for purpose - they tend not to stay shut - walk down any street and you'll see them hanging open, leaving vulnerable cables exposed.

Martin

[Raditechman]

I often notice the Virgin street cabinets around my area with their doors hanging open in all weathers, and sometimes the innards laying outside just supported by the cables. I often wonder why they do not have better and more secure cabinets.
All cabling in  my area BT or Virgin is underground. I do not normally see BT cabinets with their doors open.
Although for many years I have been receiving letters from Virgin asking me to join their network I have remained on ADSL+ with 15Mbs download.
I am changing this week to FTTC so will get higher speeds then. I am changing, within the same company, because the fibre is cheaper than my ADSL.
I never went over to cable TV or as it is now Virgin media, I know they have high speeds but it is the fact that they carry TV that puts me off.  I like TV from aerial or satellite, I also do not want to pay to watch free channels.
Maybe one day I will have to watch TV via the internet but I hope that is a long way off.
When I moved into this house it was new and the TV cable company had left a pipe in my front garden below a window, it had a blue draw string hanging out ready to pull through the cable through if I joined, I pushed that string back down the pipe many years ago! Not sure how they would run it now if I did join!
BT seemed to be able to have their cable run into the houses as they were built as the master socket was already on the wall in the lounge.
As BT and Virgin both offer telephone services now do they on new builds both put their termination inside the house or does BT still get preference i wonder?

John

[ppppenguin]

John, you can watch TV via the net any time you like so long as you have a fast enough connection. 15Mb/s is amply good enough. You don't need Virgin cable.

As for getting a draw wire into a conduit there are various ways. For shorter runs a plastic or metal draw tape can be pushed in. For longer runs, especially underground I believe the classic method is a bit of rag on the end of a string and a compressor.

Virgin instals are often untidy, with green conduit snaking across a front garden. I agree that burying them is a lot more work but some of the instals look truly horrible.

[Mike Watterson]

John, you can watch TV via the net any time you like so long as you have a fast enough connection. 15Mb/s is amply good enough

For a single user.
 If you have a bunch of people in the house each with own phone/tablet/laptop/pc etc, then it's another story!

I could easily watch most HD content on web on my 8Mbps (typically 7.5Mbps at peak time), as long as it was only me and I didn't have a data cap. The 60G byte cap per 30 rolling days is only just enough for the three of us with almost no video watching.

[ppppenguin]

Many low cost UK packages have unlimited data allowance. For example all deals from Plusnet. Obviously if you want multiple HD streams you need more BW.

If you live in a reasonably well served area you're fine. Often with a choice between cable, FTTC and ordinary ADSL. I can have about 15Mb/s ADSL, 80Mb/s FTTC or cable. If you're out in the sticks or one of the all too common "not spots" then you're stuffed. 4 miles up the road from me in an ordinary outer London suburb they struggle to get 5Mb/s with neither fibre nor cable.