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Virgin - how to know if I can connect.

  • 13-03-2021 11:46am
    #1
    Happyhouse22
    Registered Users Posts: 452 ✭✭


    Renovating house in an urban area and the electricians are asking do we need wiring for Virgin or Sky.

    Preferably we would go with Virgin but when I check on virginmedia.ie it said that we could not get it at our eir code.

    I rang Virgin to confirm that it wasn’t and they told me that it is coming to the area soon - (when pushed on a date she said April but didn’t sound convinced) she told me there is a team working on it and I gave her my contact details for them to contact me.

    All sounds good so far, except when I go back to Virginmedia I can see that most of the surrounding houses already have access....


    I’m a bit confused now, should we just go with Sky? I don’t see how it can be “coming to the area” when it’s only our house and two others that aren’t connected (all 3 one off houses set back a bit from the main road- while all the other neighbours are close to the road). That said maybe if we do wire the house for Virgin they will be able to connect it up as it is in the general vicinity.


Comments

  • #2
    winston_1
    Registered Users Posts: 1,685 ✭✭✭winston_1


    Virgin do their own wiring. An electrician should not be doing it and quite likely Virgin would refuse to use it the wrong cable is used.


  • #3
    Happyhouse22
    Registered Users Posts: 452 ✭✭Happyhouse22


    winston_1 wrote: »
    Virgin do their own wiring. An electrician should not be doing it and quite likely Virgin would refuse to use it the wrong cable is used.

    Ok interesting. I presume they won’t come and do it now (house is still months from being habitable) .

    Ideally we don’t want them coming drilling holes in our walls after it has all been finished


  • #4
    babelfish1990
    Registered Users Posts: 579 ✭✭✭babelfish1990


    Happyhouse22 wrote: »
    Renovating house in an urban area and the electricians are asking do we need wiring for Virgin or Sky.
    You should get your builder to run a duct from outside the house to your comms hub, and leave a draw string in it, so that you can pull through future cabling without having to drill holes. Even if you go with Virgin, they may upgrade their network to fibre in the future and you will need to replace their coax cable with a fibre (FTTH), although no sign of this happening yet. Eir are already replacing their network with FTTH, and if you are in an area that is still on FTTC, you will likely get an upgrade to FTTH in the next couple of years. This will also require pulling through a fibre. Sky re-sell off Eir's network in most urban areas. Unless you already have FTTH in your area, you should keep your options open.

    Your electrician is probably referring to the internal wiring in the house, and probably wants to know if you want coax or Cat-6. Virgin still mostly use copper coax to connect multi-room boxes. The other TV services (Eir, Sky, Vodafone) use WiFi or Ethernet to distribute within the house, so no need for coax. Cat-6 will future-proof your internal distribution and take the load off your WiFi. If you want to go with a legacy Virgin Media install, you might need to keep coax. VM have a box(360) that is supposed to do WiFi/Ethernet distribution, but they seem to have issues rolling it out, and other threads on Boards suggest you can't watch live TV on VM except by using coax.


  • #5
    Happyhouse22
    Registered Users Posts: 452 ✭✭Happyhouse22


    babelfish1990 wrote: »
    You should get your builder to run a duct from outside the house to your comms hub, and leave a draw string in it, so that you can pull through future cabling without having to drill holes. Even if you go with Virgin, they may upgrade their network to fibre in the future and you will need to replace their coax cable with a fibre (FTTH), although no sign of this happening yet. Eir are already replacing their network with FTTH, and if you are in an area that is still on FTTC, you will likely get an upgrade to FTTH in the next couple of years. This will also require pulling through a fibre. Sky re-sell off Eir's network in most urban areas. Unless you already have FTTH in your area, you should keep your options open.

    Your electrician is probably referring to the internal wiring in the house, and probably wants to know if you want coax or Cat-6. Virgin still mostly use copper coax to connect multi-room boxes. The other TV services (Eir, Sky, Vodafone) use WiFi or Ethernet to distribute within the house, so no need for coax. Cat-6 will future-proof your internal distribution and take the load off your WiFi. If you want to go with a legacy Virgin Media install, you might need to keep coax. VM have a box(360) that is supposed to do WiFi/Ethernet distribution, but they seem to have issues rolling it out, and other threads on Boards suggest you can't watch live TV on VM except by using coax.


    Thank you so much for this reply, have to admit I didn’t understand it all, but it has definitely provided some clarity.

    Plan with the builder was definitely to leave a duct (which I presumed could be used for Sky or virgin- so was a but surprised to be asked at this stage which we were going with)-

    I’m sure the electrician was talking about the internal cabling - still not sure which one to go for... sounds like cat 6 is the higher spec option but really don’t know what we want/need.

    Thank you for the help


  • #6
    babelfish1990
    Registered Users Posts: 579 ✭✭✭babelfish1990


    Happyhouse22 wrote: »
    Thank you so much for this reply, have to admit I didn’t understand it all, but it has definitely provided some clarity.

    Plan with the builder was definitely to leave a duct (which I presumed could be used for Sky or virgin- so was a but surprised to be asked at this stage which we were going with)-

    I’m sure the electrician was talking about the internal cabling - still not sure which one to go for... sounds like cat 6 is the higher spec option but really don’t know what we want/need.

    Thank you for the help
    If you are going with Sky, there will be additional cables going to the satellite dish for TV as well as to the Eir connection for Broadband. This may influence the position where you choose to have your duct emerge. You may even want to consider a second duct for satellite, as this is likely to be at the side or the back of the house, whereas the Eir connection is most likely at the front.

    Cat 6 is definitely the higher spec option for internal wiring, and can be used to connect WiFi access points, CCTV cameras as well as TVs and computers. Anyone refurbishing should consider all these future demands, as it is difficult to run cabling afterwards.


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