SKY abandoning their satellite customers

The BBC will in the near future get rid of transmitters to aerials and expect all viewers to use the broad band network instead saving billions of pounds in maintenance and renewal costs. Progress?

That will need an awfully big reel of optical fibre in the boot of every car,

I think it was the term "in the near future" that raised eyebrows - well, mine anyway.

Rob

When Virgin installed cable along the road here they dug up the pavement and left a slightly lumpy tarmac surface, not too bad.

When a few years later we yielded to advertising for free installation and signed up, they laid our branch cable across the lawn by using a spade to make a narrow slit in the lawn and trod the turf back into place. It was hard to see the line of the cable at all after only a few days. They lifted and re-laid the flagstones of the path expertly and I was quite impressed with the installation.

Our Virgin TIVO box can record 6 programmes at once, though we rarely do so!

Rod

Seems incredible to me that they can do that. The roads must be "owned" by some body (local council, county council) and the cable layers (or anyone else) should require express permission to dig them up in pursuit of their profit-making business. Such permission should include requirements for properly restoring the surface afterwards, enforced by appropriate penalties and loss of succeeding permissions.

A few years ago I wanted to change from Sky to Virgin, we had a Virgin shop in town so I enquired and nobody could tell me how they would get the cable from the pavement into the house, all I was told was that the installation engineer would sort it out. Ended up staying with Sky because I didn’t want the block paved drive dug up as that is the only way to route the cable.

My estate was built in the early 70's and a lot of the BT cabling was in cheaper aluminium. This corrodes quicker at the joints and is one reason why Openreach vans are everywhere 7 days a week. When SKY try to get me to come back to them, I remind them of this and they have no definite answer.

When my in-laws had sky installed the installer drilled through the wall and clipped the satelite twin cable around two rooms walls on the top of the skirting board and thorough the door upright woodwork. I fitted a conduit through the floor of the front room and part of the middle room the where the sky box was installed. I pulled out the cable and re-routed it through the conduit and had to cut off 10 meters of spare cable. If I have a fibre optic cable to my house, I will pre-install a conduit across the garden and through house ready to where I want it terminated.

David

My mothers telephone cable developed a fault so they installed a new one, the original went straight up from the socket to the loft of her bungalow and emerged at the front soffit to fly to the pole on the verge at the roadside. The new cable was clipped along the skirting round the architrave of a few doors and through the window frame, apparently they don’t use the loft space anymore.

Mike

Just so some of you know, VOIP is due to replace conventional landline in just over three years.

**LINK**

Re excavations in public footpaths.

These are governed by the NRSWA (new roads and street works act). **LINK**

The specification for the excavation and reinstatement is detailed in this document: **LINK**

As public footpaths and roads are the responsibility of the local authority, they are responsible for issuing permits and checking that the utility company do the work to the correct standard. The utility companies pay fees to the LA and are issued with fines if they don’t comply.

Stuart

... pretty much what I would expect. It is possible that, if the road is imminently due for resurfacing, a "quick fill" might be accepted (which is reasonable).

(Usually it's done the other way round: the road is beautifully resurfaced then a month later someone comes along and digs it up again )

Old Mart, our small close of houses was built mid 60’s and when the telephone cables were laid they were put under the 6 inch reinforced concrete paths, no trunking or conduit used, when we get a fault on the lines they dig up the concrete to get to the cables. If a cable company ventures out to our village then they could cause mayhem in our close, however all the concrete paths throughout the close are privately owned by each property so without the house owners permission they cannot dig up the paths anywhere in the close, look forward to that happening. Dave W

Over here They take what They want, put up the poles and when another Company wants to use the poles, They have to rent (pole rights it;s called) space on the poles. Profit does not trickle down to Land owners. Cell phone towers do pay rent to landowners tho. Once the first permission is given all future right of ways can be increased without any recourse. County ownes something like 40' from the center of the road. We still pay taxes on it all.

Edited By mark costello 1 on 12/10/2021 18:13:38

Virgin/Telewest didn't instal fibre in the street for their 'fibre Internet' it's co-ax cable in the street, with a fibre feed to the cabinet.

Oddly enough, my BT supplied 'fibre to the cabinet' (as opposed to 'fibre to the premises' is fibre as far as the converter on top of the telegraph pole directly outside the house!