Identifying old cables across front of terraces

I am doing some work for a family friend regarding their broadband options, and the front of their house has what looks like a disused cable running across the front of it, with a junction box dropping a connection off at each house. There's not a clear image on street view of their house, but ones nearby are like this:

https://i.imgur.com/sUjHcQi.png

I've highlighted the junction box and a couple of locations where it looks like this cable has been cut and removed from certain houses. The original on Google Maps is https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5473431,-0.1110291...

All I've got is street view photos unfortunately, I haven't been able to get up close to take a look. I thought it might be part of the old Rediffusion service but I've not been able to find much in the way of information on what their infrastructure looked like, or what areas would have been covered.

I presume if it's been cut out then nobody owns this anymore, and so it can come down, but it would be nice to know exactly what the deal is.

Looks like thickish cable and idea its an old tv seems reasonable. Not up to speed on what they used to install, but given a better picture someone will probably be able to tell.

That’s an old ‘Redifusion’ communal TV cable.

They used twisted pairs. One channel per pair. Switch on the window sill selected the desired channel.

Rediffusion was advanced for its time. Originally audio only, later had video superimposed on the twisted pair cabling on a carrier so as not to interfere with the audio. Rummaging on the internet will provide plenty of info such as http://www.rediffusion.info/ and https://hackaday.com/2018/08/10/rediffusion-televisi...

My grans still got rediffusion cables on her house. They still link up house to house. She used to have the dial on the window sill.

Did the introduction of cable TV kill them off?

Rediffusion was on its last legs long before cable tv came along.

Long before my time, but why?

Dated tech?

Yes, very dated.

The article linked above goes through its history well.

https://hackaday.com/2018/08/10/rediffusion-televisi...

Terrestrial UHF being so easy to pick up pretty much killed it before cable tv came along.
Sky/cable was just a nail in its coffin.

Granada bought Rediffusion in the early '80s which extended it's 'life' by a couple of years or so before the service was finally laid to rest. I remeber prior to the service ending Granada was offering free TV aerial installation for those that were going to lose their TV services.

I remember the agro I had getting my landlord to allow me to have a TV aerial installed and not really helped that it had to go on a 12 foot pole to get any sort of reasonable signal.

One piece of Rediffusion history. The area where I used to live in Hastings was used as a trial area by Rediffusion for delivering TV services via fibre optic cable back in 1976.