Another con?

Completely irrelevant in the UK, which is where this NG is based, and where we have had satellite and terrestrial digital TV for years.

And 90% of our broadband is down a telphone line, not a cable.

And cable TV never caught on.

Nice try spammer, but you picked the wrong NG.

In fact they are widely advertised in the UK with UK prices and a UK postal address. They comprise a splendid cardbox box containing a medium-quality indoor TV aerial.

Bill

Nah, his (limited) posting history, and the fact he is using the Berlin server suggests to me that it's not his spam, but he really needs lessons in identifying such obvious clickbait.

Indoor amplified HD antenna indeed!

Thanks Bill, your check/cheque is in the mail/post.

They don't mention broadband.

Virgin might disagree.

Probably just an indoor aerial to receive the US equivalent to Freeview which will only work if the signal is really strong. If they are honest they will refund your money if it doesn't work. Like the bit of wire with a round thing at the end people were selling in the 1970s.

No, They would actually agree,.

Cambridge Cable - one of the few cable companies - started to try and promote cable TV. They ended up by being a massive broadband and telephone provider.

Unlike the USA terstrial TV actually worked in the UK, and digital freeview and satellite put pay to it : Its far ceheaper tio bang up a sky dish that put cable into peoples homes

Well they are also talking about netflix and other Internet delivered servces too.

That we all know about already....

Oh my gawd. A couple of years ago I tested an active antenna for all bands. it fitted inside what looked like a piece of pvc drainpipe and was powered up the cable by a wall wart. Yes it certainly did pick stuff up. All the interference, lots of strong stations which cross modulated the weak ones. I'd imagine if you were out in the middle of Dartmoor then it would be great as an aerial for a scanner of something like a short wave radio, but really most of these miracle devices do not work very well near man made rubbish and strong transmitters, so unless this device really has come up with something new, I'd not touch it with a bargepole. Brian

Exactly. I remember a thread here a while back about so called universal tv aerials on caravans. The amplifier as a replacement for goot antennea siting and drectionality is never going to make it.

Brian

Not even an amplifier?

That is the only way most could ever work. Brian

The only indoor aerial of any sort which worked was made by Fuba and was for FM, it actually had an amplifier with very good filtering for out of band signals and a tweak knob on the top. It looked a bit like a flattened Norseman's helmet with plastic wings. Brian

Cable TV? As in a variant of DOCSIS over co-ax? Found an article which claims "At present Virgin Media?s cable network covers around 44% of the United Kingdom (12.5 million premises)". So that doesn't tie in with the claim that 90% of Broadband is down a telephone line.

As they say "citation needed".

Cheers

Dave R

May I put the record straight. I'm not a spammer. I saw a link to them and thought they might be useful in the UK. The advert seemed to suggest that I could save on my subscriptions to Sky. Remember, I'm not a technically trained person and couldn't differentiate my my dipole from a hole in the ground. But do read my OP where I said, "These sound too good to be true."

Apologies if anyone was offended. I'll grovel in public if need be. pfj

Cable could be classified as a telephone line for the purposes of the broadband figures.

quote from Virgin's Q1, 2017 report

delivering 14.2 million broadband, video and fixed-line telephony services to 5.8 million cable customers.

/quote

so it looks if they are counting each of their subscribers 3 times, once for each service they supply via cable.

In addition Just because you may live in an area with a Virgin cable in the pavement outside your front door doesn't mean that you are going to pay them to provide any services.

They bombard me with snail mail offering all sorts of large discounts (for the first year) to take their services. The last mailing offered me a £400 saving!

You could use your existing sky dish to get Freesat in the UK

With an aerial you can get Freeview in the UK

Both services do not require a subscription or any payment for the channels but may be missing some channels that you pay Sky to provide (sports for instance)

It never caught on. By the time cable was installed anyone who wanted multiple channelsof the idiot's lantern already had a Sky dish. Belatedly the cable companies realised that internet access might be the thing, but by then they were losing too much money so all bought out by Virgin Media.

...who keep trying to sign me up for cable TV, BB & phone...

As an (obvious) VM customer I will say that the first time I was able to get what was then NTL cable it was a revelation. Going from crappy ADSL to much faster cable was an enormous improvement.

I am eyeing up the progress of the FTTP installation along our street but until that gets fired up and working there doesn't seem to be much competition between {FTTC->wet_string->house} and VM co-ax. I can get somewhere around 40 Mb/sec (up to) on FTTC and am currently rocking 160 Mb/ sec+ on co-ax.

The only big attraction for FTTP would be the much faster upload speed. However I'm not running a server farm which accepts traffic from the Internet so I don't really need it.

I for one have never considered Sky as an option because my main requirement has always been Internet (which Sky do just like any other ISP) and I was only later seduced into the Tivo service. In my view Sky haver always been robbing bastards and generally rely on sports fans for their core customers.

If you want fast Internet at a price above entry level then VM are an option to consider. As always YMMV.

Cheers

Dave R

Of course they do, need to sweat those cables before fibre make it a case of obsolescence or upgrade. In the early 90s I was the first in the street to have Cable London, not for the TV but the cheaper international calls. I did suggest to them that if they offered a data package I would be interested, they weren't. Ten years later Cable London were no more, I got Blueyonder broadband. Who were then snapped up by VM. Which was ok for a while. Then the connection failed and after six months had still not been restored. Because their idiot call centre could never manage to process the information through the system that when the trench for a new gas main has created an 18" air gap it needs more action than 'turn it off and on again'. I cancelled the contract and decided mobile broadband was quite enough data for my needs. Mobile broadband works as well here in deepest Somerset (and in deepest Umbria) as it did in London. I have no fixed line phone. Next year we are promised FTTP, I will give it a try.

If you've got decent broadband already then those gadgets can be a better bet than a satellite dish - wider choice of films, and you can get 4k on the odd occasion.

Disclaimer: I'm involved in their design.

Andy