What do these boxes do or are for?

[smallfacesmikey]

Hi all,

I recently moved house and there are a number of these boxes (in the picture below) all over the house. I've got my Virgin Router set up in the kitchen and that works fine but all these boxes look to have been disconnected when the previous owners moved out. Are they for Broadband or TV or both? 

Many thanks

l

Michael

[nodrogd · Accepted solution]

Virgin Media coaxial service outlet for Broadband & TV. They usually connect to a dropbox outside where the drop from the street cabinet comes in. They may still be connected, so are handy if you wanted to move your kit to another location.

[smallfacesmikey]

Thank you for the swift reply. I'm still a bit confused as there is only one output on these and there is a brown wire nearby that has been disconnected but I have no idea where that brown wire runs to from this white box. If I reconnect the brown wire what will that provide? Could I connect my Virgin Router straight into this box? What else can be plugged into the box.

Many thanks

Michael

[goslow]

VM provides a single cable from the street to your home for TV, broadband and (in the latest installations) phone.

To allow more devices to be connected, splitters are used as per image below

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/QuickStart-set-up-and/Wiring/td-p/5397167

When the cable is split, more connection points are created to allow equipment to be used in different locations in the home. A wall box can be fitted at each location where equipment is required.

You can connect a VM hub or a VM TV box to those wall boxes.

However, from each wall box you would need to follow the cable all the way back, via the splitters, to the incoming cable to see if the individual wall box is connected to a splitter and all the way through to the outside cable.

Sometimes customers have more than one wall box (to accommodate changes in equipment layouts etc.) but not all of them might be connected at the same time.

[smallfacesmikey]

Thank you! Understood. Appreciate the response. Presumably I fit another VM Hub or VM TV box I don't necessarily have to get those directly from Virgin? Also is it possible to connect an ethernet base cable to one of these boxes to run out to a garden office to have Wifi out there? 

Michael

[goslow]

You can only directly connect VM equipment (supplied by VM) to VM's coax cables i.e. a VM hub or VM TV boxes.

You have one VM hub per account. The VM equipment (which belongs to VM) is matched to your account by serial number and MAC address etc. (so, for example, buying a VM hub or TV box off eBay would not work as VM will refuse to activate kit on your account that it has not supplied).

If you want a connection to a garden office one solution would be to run an external grade ethernet cable from the VM hub to the garden room. In the garden room you would fit your own wireless access point.

Many regulars on the forum like to put the VM hub into 'modem mode' and get their own superior networking equipment to run their home network. In modem mode the VM hub does nothing more than act as a cable modem to connect to the VM network (no router function).

[nodrogd]

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@smallfacesmikey wrote:

Thank you! Understood. Appreciate the response. Presumably I fit another VM Hub or VM TV box I don't necessarily have to get those directly from Virgin? Also is it possible to connect an ethernet base cable to one of these boxes to run out to a garden office to have Wifi out there? 

Michael

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Your equipment is rented, & only directly rented equipment is legitimate. Virgin do not sell hubs or TV boxes, so any seen for sale are actually stolen ex-rented equipment that customers have not returned. When Virgin issues equipment the serial number/MAC address is attached to your account on despatch. Then when you receive it the kit checks with Virgin servers, finds itself on the system under your account & gets authorised. Any equipment being sold therefore no longer exists on the system so will not authorise, nor can Customer Services authorise equipment that is not appearing on your account via the despatch system. You are restricted to one Virgin modem/router per account, but you can add further third party WiFi boosters etc if you wish.

You can run Ethernet to anywhere you want, but be aware that additional TV boxes require a coaxial connection as well as Ethernet/WiFI. Any alterations to the coax network MUST be done by Virgin or your services may be disrupted.

[smallfacesmikey]

Thank you. Sorry for being a bit slow on this. So on the box here there is a brown wire that has been unscrewed from the white wall box which runs into the wall and I think back to the splitter where the VM cable enters the house in a different room. I've attached a picture of the box and the disconnected wire. You can see it running back into the wall.  I'm still not sure what connecting this brown wire back to the box will do if the white wall box is 'dumb' so to speak. There's one in every room of the house so I'm baffled as to what was being used before I got here.

Thanks

Michael

[smallfacesmikey]

Thank you - I'm just trying to understand the point of theses white wall panels to be honest. There is one in every room so can't work out what was going on before I moved in. There must be some benefit but don't know what 🙂

[goslow]

Your collection of wall boxes could have evolved over time and for the individual requirements of a particular customer (or customers) to have particular items of equipment in particular rooms.

If you go back to this picture and zoom in, by way of an example,

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/QuickStart-set-up-and/Wiring/td-p/5397167

you can see the black cable coming from the wall is an input cable and the two white cables are outputs

One white cable is going to the VM hub in the picture and one is disappearing out of shot (maybe to a TV box)

The black cable coming in is probably the cable from the street.

So your collection of wires and wall boxes may be largely disconnected if they were not all required at the same time. Someone might, for example, have used the connections in one room in the summer months and changed around their living arrangements in the winter months.

Unfortunately, only you will be able to work out the arrangement of cables in your home by doing a 'hunt the wire' activity and trying to trace where the cables run to and map out some sort of diagram to help it make more sense.

If you look in the VM new build handbook it shows how new homes are wired for VM (pages 19, 20, 24)

https://www.virginmedia.com/content/dam/virginmedia/dotcom/images/shop/downloads/New-Build-Handbook-...

The house developer doesn't know how buyers will use each room so rooms are provisioned with the VM cables which can be connected as required.