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On Tue, 18 Jan 2011, Rob Beard wrote:
On 18/01/11 19:21, Simon Waters wrote:together (avoiding any expensive electronics), Noticed virgin media still splice the cables and connect them manually, where as the old FDDI standard had a relatively simple click method that works at higher speeds than Virgin's connections (although I'm not sure what else they put down the cable for cable TV - probably that need the better connector.Are you talking about the Virgin residential cable that goes to each customer premises or the fibre that goes to the Virgin green cabinets?We have Virgin cable and from the cabinet we get two cables, one coax cable (for the broadband and TV) and a phone cable (not sure how many pairs it is, I've never had reason to fiddle with the telephone point).Not sure exactly how it works to the cabinet, I gather they have fibre to the cabinet, I also believe they have main cabinets which link back to the head end and smaller cabinets link off the big ones.
Virgin (and Telewest, NTL, Eurobel, Vidrotron and all the others before they all got bought up!) have ran fibre to their cabinets for some time - at least since I was living in Bristol and cursing them for digging up the roads there 9+ years ago... (It always seemed to co-incide with me moving too )-:
And from what I recall, the telephone cable was often aluminium too, and bonded to the coax (called siamese cable - hm a google has turned this up:
http://uk.alibaba.com/product/381837476-RG59-SIAMESE-coaxial-cable.htmllooks like they specify the pair for power! (I just had cable TV and broadband, I never took their telephone service)
speaking of which - that token ring stuff I used all those years ago was actually wired as a star - we had a funky distribution box that you plugged gert big chunky plugs into which had 4 fibres and a copper pair - basically 2 pairs of fibre, so the connector box acted as a hub and looped the ends back (you could daisy-chain these boxes) and you then ran one of these dual-pair +copper cables to each device.. What then happened is that the device would sense that a cable was plugged in, activate it's own electronics to insert itself into the cable, then put power down the copper which flipped a fibere-optic relay in the junction box. It was all magic stuff - we were using it it electically hostile environments (machine tool workshops). All good fun. I even went on a course to learn how to terminate fibre optics before we started to buy this (stupidly expensive IIRC) system...
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq