Cabling degrade

jrby

Hi, I had someone out last week to look at our Horizon service as we've had problems with it over the last few months, picture buffering, lost signal. The engineer said that it was probably due toe the cabling behind the wall degrading...has anyone heard of this before

the problem is with the tv in our extension.....which is only three years old....and new cabling was put in at that time...

L1011

If water is getting in to the cabling in any way it will degrade. Particularly if its aluminium foil/copper threaded - e.g. any cheap cable - as these will get galvanic corrosion anyway.

Wabbit Ears

Who put in the cabelling in your extension and what spec is it?

Most builders will run generic cheap co-axial cable thinking,ah sure, tis grand.

Honestly, Just get VM to run you a new cable to yoru extension as they only use cable specced for modern high speed data transmission.

coylemj

Wabbit Ears wrote: »

Honestly, Just get VM to run you a new cable to yoru extension as they only use cable specced for modern high speed data transmission.

+1 if you're prepared to allow them, they will run an external cable around the outside of the extension and drill straight through the wall at the TV point.

jrby

Yes, they offered that but not keen, seems to be working better now that he took the wifi off the horizon box and gave us a seperate modem

r0chf0rt

Does anyone know what type of cable virgin use? I have the same problem as this. The virgin engineer tells me that the signal loss on the internal cabling is too high and it causes the modem to reboot periodically. When we were getting the house refurbished the electrician ran twin RC6 cable to each room and told me it was suitable for both satellite and vigintv. The tv channels work fine but the internet has had issues recently. The engineer offered to run a new cable straight down the external wall and drill a new hole into where the tv is. I don't want to do this seeing as we went to the bother of hiding all the cables. Another option he gave me was to take a second connection off the outside tap and run it directly to the modem. I would prefer this. They wont get involved with internal wiring so I have to run a new cable to where I want the modem myself. What type of cable should I put in? I went to an electrical shop and he told me to put in RC59 but what I have read this seems to be inferior to RC6? I also see mention of CT100 being better but the electrical shop don't stock it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

L1011

CT100 hasn't been made in possibly a decade and a half - it was a brand name not a type. Many other brands have a cable basically identical with 100 at the end of the name. xx100 cable, if properly made, is superior to RG6, RG6 is superior to RG59.

I've done all my internal Virgin wiring with RG6 as I got a large Webro roll for relatively little. Not making the connectors properly is probably more likely to lose signal than the cable type on short runs anyway. Use F connectors/F barrels for all joins and don't go back to the belling-lee plug until the last connector (if its needed at all - some Virgin kit uses F connectors, some doesn't)

r0chf0rt

Thanks for the reply. The internal cable is quite long. I would guess its about 80ft. I had originally thought it was going to be connected at the front of the house but the virgin feed is at the back of the house so the cable is double the length of the house. the virgin engineer joined the outside cable to the internal one so I assume that he got a decent connection. There are no other splits then until the one to goes to the horizon box/modem.

I will run a new RG6 cable from inside the house to the outside feed and hopefully that will sort it.

The Cush

L1011 wrote: »

CT100 hasn't been made in possibly a decade and a half - it was a brand name not a type. Many other brands have a cable basically identical with 100 at the end of the name. xx100 cable,

While Volex/Raydex CT (CT=Copper tape) 100 (100=1.00mm centre core) no longer exists (since 2005), the term has now become the generic name for the CAI's Cable Type 100 (CT100) benchmarked cables.

RG6 cable from both Televes and Webro are also on the CAI's benchmarked list of cables.

https://www.cai.org.uk/index.php/services/downloads/product-certification-schemes/cable-certification/110-cai-certified-cables/file