Virgin media coax cable no longer used

[Ozonechristine]

I had my house refurbished and my electrician extended a virgin media coax cable through the ceiling to the outside of the property ready for equipment installation. Virgin media installer turned up and said he couldn’t use the cable as virgin media now extend fibre optic only inside the house and none of the new equipment works on the old cable either. He searched his van for old equipment that he could potentially use but didn’t find any. He said the only option I have now is for him to drill the new fibre optic cable through the wall into the property. The problem I have is all the cables I need to connect directly into the router (CCTV, Wi-Fi boosters, CAT6 for other TVs in the house) are run through a central wall in my living room. This means a new fibre optic cable would have to be drilled through an external wall and run across the ceiling to reach the central wall which will look terrible after all the refurbishment works and painting I’ve had done on the house that was designed to hide all cables. 

The installer said virgin media have discontinued all old equipment that could be set up with the coax cable and sourcing them now is only possible if an installer happens to still have spares in their van. This seems very silly, what about all the people that already have the old cables going through their house? They all have to have new exposed cables drilled and extended through internally? Are virgin media not offering any practical solution for this?

[nodrogd]

You are in a fibre area, but that box is fibre in, coaxial out.

[Jonny-M]

I think you're stuffed, if you're in an area where VM are now doing fibre to the inside of the building then the coax that has been put in is no use to you. Depending on the quality of the cable it might not be able to be used even if you could get an external ONU installed.

[goslow]

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@Ozonechristine wrote:

This is what my box looks like currently, black wire on the right is the cable my electrician extended <snip>

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Someone, on another topic recently, linked to this video showing the process of installing the fibre inside

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxlQTCZkeYU

so the process does exist. Whether or not that really was what was planned for your installation, or whether the VM tech envisaged a difficult job running coax cables inside and so gave up, who knows.

[Adduxi]

This sounds like the new VM fibre installs on trials. It’s very similar to an Openreach job where the fibre is brought into the house to an ONT/ONU or in this case the “Hub”  It still seems to use co-ax cables for the TV boxes etc. 

So it may be fibre to the Hub, but still co-ax to TV boxes? 

[jem101]

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@Adduxi wrote:

This sounds like the new VM fibre installs on trials. It’s very similar to an Openreach job where the fibre is brought into the house to an ONT/ONU or in this case the “Hub”  It still seems to use co-ax cables for the TV boxes etc. 

So it may be fibre to the Hub, but still co-ax to TV boxes? 

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Sounds reasonable, every single one of the VM hubs and TV boxes have coax connections not fibre. So even if a property has fibre directly to it, at some point it needs to be converted to copper coax otherwise it will not be connecting to anything. No current VM hub accepts a fibre connection.

Now the ONT could be either outside the building or inside, it doesn’t matter; but for the current VM supplied kit, there has to be some kind of fibre to coax converter somewhere in the chain.

[Adduxi]

I’m guessing from ’tinternet the new VM Hub for XPON(?) will have a SFP fibre connection rather than co-ax. These type of Hubs are already in use on Openreach installs. However it still locks the customer to a VM supplied Hub.

Some “savy” users have removed the SFP module from said Hubs and put them into alternative routers that take such modules. 

user

[Roger_Gooner]

I think this is part of the XGS-PON trial. The ONT connects, I think, by Ethernet to a hub 5x or a Zyxel router.