Can I remove all the Virgin/NTL cabling?

When we bought our house in 2002 the previous owners had cable for TV & internet. We had and still have absolutely no intention of having cable for anything and a few years ago I removed all the internal cabling and boxes prior to re-decorating.

There are still a number of cables going round the outside of the house from the brown cable box at the front of the house. Can I, and is it safe to, remove these?

Can I remove the brown cable box as well?

I recall that a few weeks after we moved in I tried plugging an ordinary telephone into a cable telephone box and it had a dial tone so was clearly still live; I seem to remember ringing Virgin to ask about it and they said to ignore it all, although they did try to get me to take cable.

Perfectly safe to remove it.

You shouldn't remove it as it belongs to Virgin Media but they are hardly likely to come knocking and complain to you about it.

Be aware it may complicate things though if you do come to order cable in the future.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Perfectly safe to remove it.

I assume you refer to the cable

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

You shouldn't remove it as it belongs to Virgin Media but they are hardly likely to come knocking and complain to you about it.

I assume you mean the box.

Perhaps I should charge them for 11 years rental of my wall space.

In reply to a post by Ignitionnet:

Be aware it may complicate things though if you do come to order cable in the future.

No chance whatsoever of that.

In that cast you can rip it all out if you want. I presume the brown box at the front is merely to cover the connection from the external to internal cable and serves no other purpose.
I ripped out all the cable tv stuff when we moved in here, including what was left of the external wall box. I kept the cable and used it again later .

You shouldn't actually touch anything on the outside of the property up to that box as it's the property of Virgin Media but it's not a big deal.

I'm not actually 100% certain where the demarcation point is in the case of external cabling, I would presume it's that first box but I'm not totally sure.

I've not actually looked inside the box, though will need to to disconnect the house-side cabling.

The underground cabling to the box is only 2-3" below the surface - as we found out 18 months ago when digging out a new flower bed. And it was the cable to next door!

Come the warmer weather I'll have a look inside the box and do what a man has to do

Just be careful not to cut off the neighbours!

Her cable goes nowhere near my wall box, but it does go, seemingly, under our garden.

(Have to make sure the wife is careful with the garden fork...)

My father managed to shred his with a rotary blade. Claimed innocence to Virgin though and someone came to fix it. I imagine it's a fairly common accident given as you noted how shallow the cable burial is.

A thought. If the Virgin cable goes across our garden underground (just) and there is a Virgin box on the wall of our house and we don't not use Virgin in any size shape or form, can I claim ground/wall rent?

I rather suspect a simple, 2-letter word, answer