Does anyone know what the anticipated lifespan is of VM's buried coaxial cabling?
I am aware that a long term project has begun to upgrade the cabling by 2028 but some of the legacy cabling will already be decades old. For example the relevant manholes in my street still say Cabletel (and the BT ones Post Office - but that's another issue).
Basic online searches suggest anything between 20-30 years... which is very much coming up where I am.
Will 2028 be fast enough?
How odd, it would be good if you could post more photos of what's happening.
Some serious civils and cable pulling going on around me. Two "yellow coffin" chambers (previously mentioned elsewhere on these forums somewhere) have been installed across the road with a new grey cabinet.
The middle cabinet on my side is back in place. It seems that a new posh brick-lined chamber has now been installed which presumably will soon have its own yellow coffin cover (but not before the incoming storm sadly). Why yellow though and not a nice unobtrusive olive green?
 
 
 
 
I think the colour is deliberately yellow to warn people of the presence of the coffins.
Reddit reckons (amongst many similarly colourful suggestions - the URL is a beauty btw):
"It's a cabinet plinth with a temporary bright yellow cover on it to make it more visible so pedestrians don't trip over it... the civils work often gets completed prior to the cabinet actually being landed and fixed to the plinth." https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/wcmoxt/what_the_bloody_hell_is_this/
Well one of the two "yellow coffins" has since been replaced by a 5-6 foot tall ugly gravestone slab of a cabinet which I think is the "mother unit" for the estate. The guy from Sims Networks who was twiddling with the wires inside said that Go Live is months away as the head end (?) has yet to be done (I am aware of the backend billing issues with this stuff too).
 
Not ugly but a lovely VHUB, an L2.5 cabinet which houses the OLT and serving around 3,000 premises, so far more than just your estate. What you might also find in your estate is the aggregation cabinet which serves 500-600 premises and/or the distribution cabinet (50-64 premises).
Well VM Xgs-pon local cabinet installations completed in January but nothing obvious has happened since.
However I see that Telcom Infrastructure is scheduled to do street-length "test rod and roping" in the neighbourhood over the next few weeks. As far as I can see this is a precursor to FTTP. Am I right to feel a little bit optimistic do you think?
VM has been overbuilding the HFC network with fibre since 2022, with several areas which should be live. However I don't think any are live as there seems to be some accounting issues in migrating customers onto XGS-PON. VM does have customers on XGS-PON but these are all new customers on nexfibre's network.
I just had a chat with a couple of engineers from Sims Networks who are attending the local L2.5 cabinet today. They said they were PON spine cabling (which is apparently a later stage in PON deployment) and that Go Live was therefore likely to come in the next few months.
Bear in mind a lot of the delays are due to long lead times getting the power feeds from electric companies. Hence cabinets inplace (sometimes with equipment), but no power for 3-9 months !!
For XGS-PON only the VHUBs for the OLTs require power, the aggregation and distribution cabinets are unpowered.
Well there's been increasing activity around the local VM L2.5 cabinet. These days it's actual VM network engineers too rather than outsourced bods. I had a quick chat with them and asked for a ballpark date for the Xgs-pon upgrade Go Live in my bit of Cardiff. There was some beard stroking and teeth sucking before a fairly confident (albeit equally cautious) end of March 2025. You heard it here first.
The smaller XGS-PON cabinets were build in our area well over a year ago, perhaps pushing two. There has been no advertising, or marketing that I have seen for upgrading the old co-ax installs. In fairness, our old VM co-ax circuit was always very good and solid. One of the reasons for leaving was I no longer needed DualWAN redundancy, it was nothing to do with the co-ax circuit performance. Maybe NTL built them better in the old days.... 🙂
Well out of the blue it appears that Hyperoptic has decided to begin to have a presence in my bit of Cardiff (I have never seen it listed in my general area on One Network before). It's all rather exciting. Trustpilot reviews are good but ISPreview reviews are a bit rubbish. Anyone have any direct experience of Hyperoptic? How would it compare to VM?
The obvious concerns about Hyperoptic are that it's a money-losing company with big debts. This is quite common with altnets and you should be aware of this.
The anticipated lifespan of Virgin Media's buried coaxial cabling is generally estimated to be between 20-30 years. However, this can vary depending on several factors such as the quality of the cable, environmental conditions, and how often the cable has been disturbed. Some users have reported that their coaxial cables, installed decades ago, are still in good condition. Virgin Media has begun a long-term project to upgrade the cabling by 2028
