Cable please!

June 24, 2009 1:10 PM

Is there any way I can get cable to my house even though it's listed as "not in a cable area"? It's very near one!

I live at the end of a little driveway, maybe 10m long (in the UK). When I check my postcode with BT or Virgin, both list the house and the two others on the driveway as "not in a cable area". Unfortunately, it's also miles from the exchange, so the DSL we get instead runs at maybe 400Kb/s (absolute maximum 1Mb/s and I've only ever seen that once), which is really annoying, especially when coming back from a nice speedy JANET connection. So far so good.

The thing is, I've checked the house down the end of the driveway, literally 10m away from our front garden, and they have cable, which leads me to think that there's a nice fast cable running down the road but which doesn't quite reach our house. There is a ditch by the side of the driveway, and from there a nice easy path through the front garden to the house itself. One catch: apparently some time ago (10 years, maybe?) the company offered to lay a cable. Unfortunately, when they turned up they tried to run it through our neighbour's front garden, which she wasn't too happy about. So we told them not to lay the cable and they left. This seems to have left our house as 'unconnectable'.

So, the question: is there any way we can get cable? I'm guessing we'd have to pay for it ourselves, any idea how to do this or how much it would cost? Thanks in advance folks!

posted by katrielalex to computers & internet (6 comments total)

I'm in the same position, except that none of the houses or flats in my little close is connected to cable for the simple reason that in order to lay the cable from the next road into ours, it would have meant running it under 15 feet of Epping Forest and the Corporation of London refused point blank to allow them to do it. It's really annoying, walking out of my close and seeing the cable running into the houses just a few yards away.

If the only way to run the cable to your home is through adjoining land and the owner of that land doesn't consent, then I don't think there's anything you can do about it. It's not just a question of agreeing to put the garden back to how it looked before. The owner of the land would have to grant a legal 'easement' to the cable company giving it permission to run the cable under their land, This would also need to cover any future maintenance obligations and reinstatement of damage caused in maintaining or repairing the cable. This would involve lawyers for both the cable company and the owner (I would imagine that Virgin/NTL's lawyers have standard documents for this), and some expense. An easement is something that 'runs with the land' - so if that property is sold, the easement would be binding on the new purchaser. To have the cable on your own land, you would need to grant Virgin a 'wayleave', but I would imagine its standard service contracts incorporates this.

I would say that the first step is to approach your neighbour, see if she'd be agreeable and then ascertain from Virgin the likely expense. Factor in another grand or two for legal fees.
posted by essexjan at 2:32 PM on June 24

I am an electrician in the Central Florida - lots of orange groves and citrus farming. I have dealt with similar situations several times.

Hire an electrician to wire the house for cable, and then run a wire from your house to a point that is inthe cable area. Local cable companies here won't wire houses that are too far out of area - but if the home owner wires the house, and brings a connection right to the cable company, then they will hook it up.

Just find out from the cable company where they want the wire run to - heck, in this area, the electrician coordinates with the cable company.

You probably could do the wiring yourself - I mean, in the US, cable TV runs on low voltage CAT-5 wire. You can't really hurt yourself with that stuff. The worst you can do is get bad reception.
posted by Flood at 2:45 PM on June 24

I mean, in the US, cable TV runs on low voltage CAT-5 wire.

Not sure what you are talking about. It's coax everywhere I've heard of. Fios runs on fiber, and U-verse is just DSL on crack.

But the danger of wiring it up yourself isn't in hurting yourself, it's using incorrect cable types. The kind of cable that can stand being outside for more than a season or two is quite different from the stuff you get at Walgreens. Terminations, grounding and the rest are also important.
posted by gjc at 5:57 PM on June 24

If I were in your shoes, I'd be talking nicely to my cabled neighbors and seeing if they'd be interested in sharing their connection via 802.11n.
posted by flabdablet at 7:10 PM on June 24

Are you friendly with your neighbor? a super-duper WiFi system would probably get you going. Maybe a system with paired cantennas?

offer to split the cost of the subscription, at least
posted by KenManiac at 7:29 PM on June 24

I was at university with someone who (until recently) was very high up at NTL/VirginMedia cable, and he basically said that they had stopped "rolling out" cable to people a long time ago because of the high cost, and they were concentrating on converting customers in their area to cable.

My place was cabled up with analogue cable, but they can't even replace said cable with a digital fibre optic, so I keep being offered the analogue package.

Solution? Get Sky. :(
posted by almostwitty at 5:57 AM on June 25