cabling for broadband - please bring me up to date

[jim]

Home move on the horizon to an area with cable/fibre broadband (not sure wh ich!).

New house needs refurbishment & I need to plan & specify trunking & cabling for an up-to-date broadband/TV/telephone installation. I'd like something at least as capable as my present connection (which took some working out a t the time).

Present house is in a 6mbs only BT ADSL area. In brief std tel wire from B T exchange arrives at front door master socket. Telephone is immediately f iltered off & tel cable is daisy chained around the house to numerous socke ts. Unfiltered ADSL signal goes via std tel cable to a Belkin wifi router at centre of house. Connection to PCs is via 4 CAT6e cables run to RJ45 wal l sockets supplemented by WiFi.

Option 1 seems to be Virgin which tells me the new house is 'pre-wired' for virgin media cable/fibre & there should be a brown box on the outside wall with connections for also for telephone & TV. (I think they said there are 4 connections coming out of the brown box - which would be?) I can't recal l what cabling, if any, there is indoors & it will be 10 days before I can return to check).

Please, what cabling (especially what type) & boxes do I need to get some s emblence to my current set up?

Option 2 BT Infinity is being widely advertised in the area. All signs of old BT wiring have gone except drilled holes ;-)

What would a new broadband BT connection involve outside (eg cable laying)? Inside how similar could I make it to my current set up?

Does cable use ADSL signalling? What is the ideal way to connect to Virgi n?

TIA for any and all advice and insights. The current installation is only

7 years old & took some working out then. I feel all at sea again!

Many thanks

[Adrian]

Virgin's customer service has a truly legendary reputation - but, really, it's no worse than any other supplier.

And the performance is leagues ahead of ADSL. Genuine, solid 30/60/100Mb, no contention, far less slow-down at peak times.

It's the one thing I miss about our old house. Our current 2Mb-ish-mostly ADSL is surprisingly decent, given the location, but...

Exactly the same, but instead of an ADSL modem/router/wireless, you have a cable modem/router/wireless, supplied by Virgin.

No.

The only difference is that it's a different modem/router box.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Fairly sure cable needs a modem and router either separately or together in one box. With maybe wifi. You can feed that into cat 5 switches etc for networking.

Phone is broken out of the same co-ax cable by the FUNCTIONAL equivalent of a microfilter. If you are cat 5 wiring the house the phones can use that.

go with cable for internet.

Nope. Its another weird protocol whose name escapes me.

size 9's?

seriously though, whatever way they say or with a cable router.

[D.M.Chapman]

There will be a brown box on the wall outside, and a bit of coax+phone will terminate there. They have usually lost the lid and are full of water :-) A bit of green conduit will be run up the garden a few inches down from a small triangular cover in the pavement outside each house.

Virginmedia customer service can be a bit random, but has been a lot better more recently. If you use twitter, they respond well to tweets and (possibly why...) the twitter team are all uk based.

I've dealt with worse, and if you have their phone then it's free to ring them anyway so redial for next call centre bod if getting nowhere :-)

If you go cable then they will terminate it in the house for you and will leave you a "superhub" for your broadband. That's a modem (it's not ADSL) and router all in one. It's "OK" and would do you for a while. If you decide it's too limited then you can switch it into modem mode and then buy any cable router (basically, what you have now just with the builtin ADSL modem replaced with an ethernet connection)

No idea what the costs are with BT if new cabling needed, but one thing you will probably get with FTTC will be a better uplink speed than virgin. I'm currently on 100Mbit down with Virgin, but only 5Mbit up. BT will be more balanced than that.

No it's not ADSL. The only way to connect to virgin is with their modem/router. They own the equipment, you effectively rent it. When it needs upgrading they send you a new one. If it breaks they send you a new one.

If you don't like it switch it into modem mode and use whatever router you want but if you need to call their helpline they will want you to connect your machine directly to the modem for diag (and to help rule out your router being the problem).

If you are going with Virgin then the more you take the better the deal. Also, they really like you to take phone with them and cancel BT (not an issue in your case it seems!). I guess this is to make it harder for you to migrate away.

If you want their TV then the TiVo is the top option, and IMO the one to go for. It's not perfect, but it's not bad and it their Sky+ equiv. There is a lot of video on demand stuff for free if you have their higher tier TV packs.

Also, as a new customer do not just sign up with Virgin. There are plenty of deals around. Quidco and the like will give you generous cashback, or if you want I can get you free instalation as I'm an existing customer. I'll get a 50 quid discount on my bill as well and you'll save the 50 quid setup fee. To be honset, if you moan at them on the phone enough and take a generous enough package I suspect you'll be able to get that for free anyway but the offer is there :-)

Darren

[dennis]

That is supplied by virgin and remains their property.

Virgin phones arrive on wires exactly the same as BT does. The wires just happen to be wrapped in the same plastic as the coax.

The phone wires go into a connection block and the coax into a terminator inside the brown box.

[Dave Liquorice]

Define "refurbishment". Does that include a complete strip of old wiring and its replacement or is it just a bit of decorating?

If it's a rewire job, then I suggest flooding the place with Cat5e and Coax. Put two network points and a coax in diagonally opposite corners of every room as a minimum, on the other diagonal to the one that the door is on.

The in rooms that might be an SOHO/study add some more. And the position that will be used by the TV, at least 4 Network and 4 coaxes and a number of double sockets. That position here has six of each. The current setup is using 4 network (TV, BlueRay, Raspberry Pi and Squeezebox) and 3 coaxes, with the possibly of a fourth and/or fith coax if I expand the Pi into a Freeview and/or Freesat PVR...

All these cable run back to a cupboard somewhere where the incomimg broadband/phone and feeds from the satellite dish aerials etc also all arrive.

So up shot, don't think too hard about exactly what you want where. Just put in points so if you do want to put a reciever or network device almost anywhere there is a relevant point not far away. Cable is cheap ... installation is the hard or expensive part. It's much easier to bung in far more than you ever think you are going to need during a full rewire than just bung one cable in after you have decorated....

[Brian Gaff]

Virgin here is standard for telephone, and coaxial cable that carries both tv and broadband. I only use the broadband myself. There is a little modem inside which converts to the normal lan cable to my router. They now supply a router/modem combo but it can be configured as a modem only if you like. No idea aboutthe tv side, just know its on the same cable Fibre ends some place in the street. BT may be doing things differently, but I have not investigated it. Brian

[Andy Burns]

Maybe it depends which Virgin pre-decessor company installed the kit, but the ones I've seen use a 'shotgun' cable with a coax and a couple of twisted pairs.

DOCSIS

[Mr Pounder]

They don't want it back if you leave.

[polygonum]

The important points are:

They have to supply it. You cannot supply your own. As it is their property then, except in extreme cases, it's their responsibility to fix it if it breaks.

What happens to a secondhand one when you terminate the contract is very low on the list of importance.

[Stephen]

Not true.... Virgin media supply what looks like shot gun cable, but actually its a coax with telephone wire bonded into a shotgun cable arrangement.

The internet comes over the same co-ax as the TV signals. The Telephone part is just for telephones only.

its DOCSIS

[John Rumm]

Typically there would be normal phone cable for the phones, and then co-ax to cable TV points and to the broadband router.

Everything after the router can be the same - cat5 hardwired sockets etc, wifi and so on. Phones again similar either normal phone cable from the virgin master box, or run it over structured wiring with your own PABX if you want.

Delivery of infinity outside is the same as delivery of a POTS line (for that is all that it is). That terminates at a master socket with a slightly posher looking built in filter. Unless you have a VDSL router, then the VDSL line goes into a BT supplied cable modem box that talks PPPoE on ethernet, and you drive that from a suitable router - again often supplied as a package from your broadband provider. (I normally just connect the BT boxes direct to the WAN2 socket on a Vigor 2830)

After that, its the same arrangement as you currently have.

No, its not ADSL signalling. My preference is a co-ax run from the main box to the comms cupboard, and modem / router there into your normal network wiring.

If you are starting with a clean slate, then there is allot to be said for just festooning the place with cat5 in the style of a structured wiring system. That pretty much takes out all the complexity of thinking through the options, since you can change the function of any cable drop with ease after installation.

[Mark]

Agreed. I found this out the hard way just having put in some extra network points.

[matt]

Ber in mind with Virgin that upload speeds are only 1/10th of the download speeds and you can't have a fixed ip address. Whether that's a problem or not depends on wht you want to do.

Matt