Neighbour Sharing My Cable

Hi all

I have a Virgin Media business connection at my work premises. There are also some flats as part of the same building. One of the residents has just had a VM connection put in, and they have run the cable directly from my external brown box. So instead of running a second cable from they cabinet there's basically a single cable running from it to my box, where it then splits in two and feeds both me and the neighboring flat. We both have the same landlord, so I can understand why I didn't hear anything about it, but I'm concerned that my connection is going to be impacted. Does anyone know if I'm likely to experience issues? If so I'll get in touch with Virgin.

Thanks.

Does anyone know if I'm likely to experience issues? If so I'll get in touch with Virgin.

No.

It really is non issue. It just you are aware of it. It happen every where on the network.

It how DOCSIS works.

Nobody has a second cable running back to the cabinet, it's not how cable (and DOCSIS) works.

There is one cable running down the street and each property taps off it.

I refuse next door to use my cable in my garden. Locked the gate. Virgin Media engineer are not allow to enter my back garden without my premission. I told them don't bother to put cable in my back garden for next door as I will say NO. Not my problem.

Edited by adslmax (Fri 31-May-19 10:54:37)

OK, thanks for your help. I was just worried that the installer was being lazy and I was going to experience an impact on my service. Glad to know that it is not going to be the case.

Well you may well see an impact as you now have more connections on your segment and the contention is thus higher. However this is how DOCSIS works. You would need a leased line to avoid that and there is always contention somewhere in the system anyway.

What does your comment have to do with the OP's post?

In reply to a post by nemeth782:

Nobody has a second cable running back to the cabinet, it's not how cable (and DOCSIS) works.

There is one cable running down the street and each property taps off it.

If I am reading what you have put correctly then this is not how the Virgin Media network is installed around here.

Each property usually has it's own coaxial cable run from the outside of each house (the brown box or grey if from Telewest/Yorkshire cable days) to the nearest street cabinet (RG6 or RG11 coax dependent on distance).

The cable is pulled through the underground ducts using a "Cobra" rodding device by the pre-installation team. The little square (or triangle) access hole (called a Toby box) you see at the end of your drive is where they would rod the cable from lifting up any manhole covers to intercept the cable if it needs to go around corners. They leave the excess cable in the cabinet (or the chamber in front of the cabinet) so that when the installation team come, they can pull the slack out to run through the garden/drive etc.

Although houses usually get their own cable, there are instances on flats and other communal buildings where the same cable will be used (such as no space, not allowed to pull another cable to connect a new customer.

Local street cabinets, are connected to each other by a much large higher quality coaxial cable. This cable is not what you are teed off directly off though. This larger cable will eventually link to a fibre node that sends all data from the interconnected cabinets back to Virgin's core network.

In reply to a post by jabuzzard:

Well you may well see an impact as you now have more connections on your segment and the contention is thus higher. However this is how DOCSIS works. You would need a leased line to avoid that and there is always contention somewhere in the system anyway.

Nothing really to do with the cable being split there, though. Happens however the install is done.