Virgin
My builders have recently completed an extension to my house where they have left your cable running through a new part of the attic internally.
As the cable is inside the house and exposed, there appears a serious health and safety issue.
Could one of your agents contact me directly please to remedy.
I await hearing from you.
[MOD EDIT: Post split to create own thread]
This is primarily a user forum, so you won't get a direct answer. A staff member may pick this up in time to pass a message.
Is the cable feeding your own or a neighbour's broadband connection? If not you can just remove it yourself, it carries no harmful voltages.
If it does provide your broadband and you want it moved to a different route, there is a fixed charge of £25 for the service.
Forum TeamHey DAV2024, thank you for reaching out and a warm welcome to the community I am sorry to hear this.
Please can you attach some photos so we can take a look at this?
Also is it just inside, nothing is outside?
Hi
Thanks for the reply. The cable runs to all of my neighbours right and left of my house. I have followed it down each side to at least 12 or more houses. I believe its connected to about 60 houses in total.
It runs in the new extension of my house in the attic.
I will need to speak to someone sooner rather than later as it is a safety concern for me and my family.
I have previously reported the issue to your phone teams who confirmed i would be called back but never was.
I would prefer not to, but I will take matters into my own hands if I can't get some substantive response/communication and action.
Thank you
Sounds like an unusual situation.
Out of interest, how did this cable serving multiple properties come to be run through your house in the first place? Was it something you in inherited when you moved in?
In the absence of any pictures, it sounds as if the cable originally ran along the outside of the houses, and an extension to this house has been built around it.
It would perhaps have been better if VM had been asked to move the cable before the building works were done.
The cable will not be a safety hazard, unless perhaps by tripping.
jpeg1 wrote:It would perhaps have been better if VM had been asked to move the cable before the building works were done.
The cable will not be a safety hazard, unless perhaps by tripping.
It sounds like the OP has already reported it. No doubt VM have turned up, ascertained it’s not their infrastructure & walked away. This is an old analogue 4 channel 1st gen relay cable, I’d put money on it.
Yes - that's what happened; it ran on the outside, and they built around it.
Without photos it’s hard to tell, but that would be one hell of a thick coax to run 60 houses. I’m guessing this is actually a very old disused Rediffusion/British Relay installation. This was a multicore cable that was daisy chained from house to house under the eaves. If it is, it’s a 1st generation 1960s installation & it’s nothing to do with Virgin or their predecessors, who only started up in the 1990s with a completely different distribution method. Most of these installations were offloaded to local authority control when Granada TV rentals pulled the plug on them in the mid 1980s & haven’t been live since.
This is very interesting, thank you for the insight. Will see if i can upload a photo but the cable is as you describe it, very thick black coax. Far thicker than your usual fibre or electrical cable if that makes sense. It not bendable and you would not be able to wrap it manually (if that also makes sense). The estate is circa 70 years old so would fit into the time description you have mentioned. Interestingly, my builder believes it is live however.
Sounds very likely. A couple of photos would confirm one way or another.
It can be checked for live current with a basic DIY device.
This is an old system of cable TV dating back to the 1960s or 1970s with a headend and coaxial cable (fitted with daisy-chained taps) running either along the houses or strung between the houses on catenary wire. (No fibre in those days.) The cable might have had an air-spaced cartwheel type of dielectric design with a double shield of copper tape and braid screen. Amplification was typically done with thermionic (vaccuum) valves with amplifiers installed in rain-proof boxes.
The rollout of HFC networks in the 1980s and 1990s killed off the little community cable TV operators who used these all-coaxial networks. So, in a long-winded way I'm saying that this cable is long-redundant and can be safely removed.
Hi Roger, thanks for the information. Would you know is there any reason it would still be live? Surely, if it was redundant it would not be.
DAV2024 wrote:Hi Roger, thanks for the information. Would you know is there any reason it would still be live? Surely, if it was redundant it would not be.
In the early days there was a mast on a hill with one or more aerials to receive the TV signals, with the headend nearby. Both the land under the mast and headend usually had to be rented. The rest of the infrastructure such as cables, amplifiers, taps, ducts (sometimes) and CPE all cost to be installed and maintained, so subscribers were needed to pay for this. Nobody goes to all this trouble now to deliver an inferior TV service especially as free TV is aavilable to almost everyone from an aerial or satellite dish.
Roger_Gooner wrote:This is an old system of cable TV dating back to the 1960s or 1970s with a headend and coaxial cable (fitted with daisy-chained taps) running either along the houses or strung between the houses on catenary wire. (No fibre in those days.) The cable might have had an air-spaced cartwheel type of dielectric design with a double shield of copper tape and braid screen. Amplification was typically done with thermionic (vaccuum) valves with amplifiers installed in rain-proof boxes.
The rollout of HFC networks in the 1980s and 1990s killed off the little community cable TV operators who used these all-coaxial networks. So, in a long-winded way I'm saying that this cable is long-redundant and can be safely removed.
Rediffusion/British Relay was not an RF tuned system. The distribution cable contained around 12 separate insulated copper cores each one carrying a different service (4 analogue TV & 4 radio channels plus spares). I used one of these systems until 1979, & it was an absolute pain if one of the cores broke. The technician had to trace the junction boxes down the street, knocking on the door of every house that had or used to have the service until he found one that had a good signal on that core. Then had to get access to make repairs. Problems like this used to take weeks to fix, & when a certain Prime Minister bought in right-to-buy it was inevitable the systems were destined to be shut down.
The OP might not have a Rediffusion cable. Remember Rediffusion used mostly twisted pair but this had limitations. Additional channels were accommodated by adding pairs but when that became impossible they frequency-stacked on each pair - which became awkward. Eventually Rediffusion bit the bullet and the switch to superior coaxial cable was made. In the meantime other cable operators were using coaxial.
You can get an indication if it is live or not using a non-contact voltage tester (the device gives an indication only though rather than proving dead). £10 to £20-ish from a local DIY shop.
Can you access any joins in the cable at a junction box, for example, for further inspection and testing?
If you post up some pic's of what you can see, inside and out, you should get further info and opinion.
Few pics of the cable here, of anyone recognises?
The most useful thing you could do would be to have a look at where the cable comes from and goes to and take photos of any boxes that it's connected to along the way.
Needless to say this is definitely being done in the wrong order and building around it with the view of it being removed afterwards is bizarre.
