CMI Cable

I recently moved to Swords and just assumed up to now that the town was served by the old Cablelink network. But I noticed the amount of MMDS aerials in the town and also that the cabled areas didn't have the usual cables strewn along the gutters. A manhole cover outside the estate (shown below) gave me a clue that it was actually Cable Management Ireland (CMI).

So my curiosity is getting the better of me now. The only things I know about them are that they were one half of what eventually became Chorus (the other being Irish Multichannel), and from visiting my aunt in Celbridge in 1998, that they had Cartoon Network which wasn't on the Cablelink system. Does anyone have any memories of their service?

The Cush

Karsini wrote: »

The only things I know about them are that they were one half of what eventually became Chorus (the other being Irish Multichannel),

CMI Cable and Suir Nore Relays were taken over by TCI/Princes Holdings (Irish Multichannel) in early 2000, later that year the whole lot was rebranded Chorus Communications.

http://www.irishtimes.com/business/cable-firm-takeovers-referred-to-regulator-1.236322

icdg

It was an odd one - Swords and Malahide were islands of CMI coverage in what was otherwise Cablelink-land. Consequently on cable they had a much better line up than the rest of Dublin.

Note though, MMDS was Cablelink throughout Co. Dublin though.

Stasi 2.0

Dundrum was also in CMI land.

the Dublin Cablelink network was actually a hotchpotch of franchises/networks serving various parts of the city originally run by different companies which through mergers and takeovers became Cablelink.

Similarly CMis network(s) were a result of takeovers and mergers of (mostly) formerly independently/locally owned operations.

A CMI (Swords) bandscan from the mid 1990's

TV5 45.75 MHz
RTE1 53.75 MHz
RTE2 61.75 MHz
Sky News 152 MHz
Eurosport 160.25 MHz
Channel 4 175.25 MHz
BBC2 191.25
UTV 199.25
Sky Sports (Encoded) 208 MHz
BBC1 216 MHz
Sky 1 224 MHz
Movie Channel (Encoded) 232 MHz
MTV Europe 248 MHz
Cartoon Network (day) 256 MHz
TNT (night) 256 MHz
Community 264 MHz
NBC Super 272 MHz
CNN 386 MHz

They carried FM radio but it was fed directly off an aerial rather than remodulated (as on Cablelink)

Most CMI networks put RTE1 and 2 on Band 1 and many of them avoided using the same channels as local RTE Band 3 transmitters. Their Swords headend was located IIRC near Glassmore and Channel 4 tended to suffer a lot of CCI from an S4 transmitter in Wales.

Presumably its all digital now ?

Antenna

Stasi 2.0 wrote: »

Sky News 152 MHz

Did that suffer from ingress interference of the (now discontinued) 153MHz national pager network (Eirpage), would have caused intermittent patterning if it was a problem ? (signal strengths of that could be quite high)

Stasi 2.0

Antenna wrote: »

Did that suffer from ingress interference of the (now discontinued) 153MHz national pager network (Eirpage), would have caused intermittent patterning if it was a problem ? (signal strengths of that could be quite high)

Dont remember it being an issue but memory is a bit fuzzy.

L1011

Sky News on CMI in Maynooth had severe picture quality issues which were never satisfactorily resolved. I would have to dig up an old hard drive to find a frequency list from my TV tuner to check what frequency it was on.

I had assumed it may have been the very first gen DTT trials but Eirpage would be more likely, based on the frequency and duration

Stasi 2.0

The Swords cable network did suffer from aircraft flutter as the headend was underneath a busy flightpath to/from the airport nearby.

This caused some problems for me a few years back converting old VHS recordings to DVD as the (Hitachi) DVD recorder was mistaking the interference for Macrovision pulses which was a crude copy - protection system which used to be widely used on commercial VHS recordings.

A different make/model of DVD recorder resolved the problem.