What coax does Virgin Media use to deliver their services?

[ikearns]

Morning All

Our external VM box has taken a bashing, not sure how but it is in the most stupid of places and at the right height to get kicked and knocked by anything passing.

I was looking to cut the current F-type plug off and compress a new one on there (I have all the toolage and connectors as this is how I have run and terminated the cables before) however the cable looks a bit thicker. Is this standard RG6 cable?? It has been there a number of years so might just be distorted.

 

[sparkymarka]

Triple screened ....I think CT125 is the nearest in size , lucid will probably be able to give you the correct size ...

 

[Lucid]

Strictly speaking, everything in a VM installation right the way through via the off-street connections, all internal cables, splitters and the TV and broadband boxes are VM's property. The first bit that's yours in the signal chain is the video/audio or Ethernet connection. It's all covered under the monthly subscription fee.

The cable that VM use is triple shielded. That means there are two foils and a braid in a foil/braid/foil configuration. The reason is that unlike TV and satellite signals which range in the hundreds to thousands of MHz range, it's said that VM goes down to base-band video level at roughly 5MHz.

VM's cable appears to be towards the thicker end of the size range for RG6-sized cables. This means that the outer diameter is about 6.9mm. The typical size for good quality RG6 such as Webro -WF100 and -HD100* is around 6.5mm. I've used SAC Snap-n-Seal compression connectors such as this to terminate VM cables in the past.


* HD100 is the closest retail equivalent to VM's own triple-shielded coax. It's actually higher spec because it's all copper rather than the lesser-quality aluminium.

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[dishman]

I have always been curious about this.

My virgin media cable to the house was installed when the area was first cabled up back in 1996, by Bell Cable Media.

Over that time the bandwidth required for modern communications has grown exponentially.

I have always wondered what the bandwidth limitation of that 1996 cable that connects my house to the distribution box in the street is.

Do they use the same cable on installations now as they did in 1996?

Or do they use one with a higher maximum bandwidth?

I obviously see no limitation on my current internet bandwidth. It's just something I have always been curious about.

If we take the idea that the standard phone line copper connections seem to have around a 15-20mbps bandwidth limitation, and they have been around for 50+ years. Then I assume there is still a lot of headroom in the 1996 cable.

 

[Lucid]

It's a good question.

I don't know about the absolute numbers in terms of bandwidth; never really had cause to look it up because C&W/Nynex/Virgin Media is sort of a closed system up to their router or recorder box. However, the nature of the signals have changed quite a bit since 1996. We're doing far more with the same bandwidth space thanks to the progression from analogue to digital, and the evolution of more efficient compression algorithms.

To give you a parallel, in the space occupied by one analogue terrestrial TV channel, we can now fit roughly 15 digital TV channels at slightly higher SD resolution (16:9 vs 4:3). Also, despite being four times the pixel resolution, the same channel space that carries 15 SD digital channels can carry 7 HD channels because the compression is more efficient.

It's not just the number of channels, but how tightly they're packed. Analogue used to require several channel spaces clear between the terrestrial broadcast channels to avoid interference. Now you've got digital muxes parked next to each other on some transmitters.


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