Move Virgin Wall Box and Network

[FunkMaster]

Hello All;

Have just exchanged on my first house (the house I been renting) and doing some minor renovations downstairs, which includes replacing the floors, removing wallpaper (finally can) and a raft of other things ... which means a bit of a construction site, but an opportunity to perhaps lay down some cleverness for networking / media services.

At the moment, the house is supplied by BT for internet and Sky for TV, but as I am in a Virgin area, I will be moving to them (been holding off, because of this question).

Downstairs, in the current lounge where the BT wall socket is, there is a older white box next to that, that says "Cable Wireless" and after some research that appears to a old NTL box.

As my OH is remodelling the lounge, which is changing it's "role" into a dining room and the lounge/tv room is moving to the other side of the house (closer to the back garden) ideally she said she wants the "clean" look - which in simple terms is "None of that technology crap on the wall".

So it dawned on me, perhaps I could actually get this wall box moved to be under the stairs (out of sight) and have the Hub in there too.

Obviously I'd ask Virgin to do this and pay the £99 fee for moving it all ....

So wanted to get a sense check if I am on the right track:

1.) Get Wall Box moved to under the stairs (not sure if the cable that runs from outside to the current box is modern / works | but that's for the engineer)
2.) The hub will be in here too
3.) Run the coax cable under the floor boards within a conduit or duct thing, to the new lounge
4.) Include 2 or 3 CAT5e / 6 (not sure which) in this wiring, to the lounge (thinking PS4, Tivo, AppleTV)

As the Hub is now under the stairs, I am more than certain that this will screw the wireless and have interference. So then I have some further choices:

1.) Hardwire my ASUS-5300 monster to the Hub and find a strategic place to put it, that my wife doesn't mind seeing it (Spare Room, about 10m away ... need to figure out the wiring for that)
2.) Put in a nice looking (she seems to like the modern look of it) Wireless Access Point such as: https://www.broadbandbuyer.com/products/23765-ubiquiti-uap-ac-pro/ | which I can put just outside the "under the stairs location" above a doorway, where a old alarm used to be located.


Any comments, thoughts, suggestions, views .... ?

 

[DaveHerns]

Virgin just "throw in " their installations in the easiest quickest and cheapest way. No hidden wiring etc

 

[FunkMaster]

Virgin just "throw in " their installations in the easiest quickest and cheapest way. No hidden wiring etc

Pretty sure that BT, Sky and all the others do exactly the same. To be honest, I wasn't expecting them to do much more than move the BOX / wiring from where it is now, to a new location ....

I guess one of my questions really is .... are there others who have their wallbox in a "hidden" place.

 

[Blagard]

I have Virgin at my house and I knew the cable was going to be surface mounted wherever unless I made life easy for them. So I actually installed the cable route complete with draw cords to where I wanted it and all out of sight. Result was the guys were more than happy to make use of my easy out of sight route, so we were both winners.

 

[Tigercubrider]

When I had virgin installed, I did a deal because I wanted the hub in an upstairs back room

They dropped me a reel of cable and I ran it myself along the front of the house, through the garage and into the loft- then down the back. The guy just connected

Then later I had it moved to the front lounge wall, and have run my own coax under the skirting to be on the other side of a chimney breast. I bought my own coax to run up a Channel that I made in the internal wall to come out by their external one where it screws in .

Try to get the virgin installed where it is best for you to modify it once it's gone

 

[Iamchamps]

Virgin just "throw in " their installations in the easiest quickest and cheapest way. No hidden wiring etc

As they have a certain amount of time to complete a job you can't really expect the world. All companies do the same, like mentioned if you want the job done a certain way then help the installer out and have stuff ready for when they arrive I.e. A conduit and draw cord so whoever installs can simply pull the cable through for you.

 

[oldbutnotdead]

Virgin seem quite relaxed about leaving a shedload of slack for you to play with later as well if that works better for you- and of course no-one here would dream of getting a lump of RG6 and some F connectors and extending their own cable installations would they (bit depressing to find they're using CCA but seems to work for them.....)

 

[Lucid]

I think you've done a decent job covering the basics.

If I were in your shoes then here's what I might consider:

Conduit for the VM cable: Use 40mm or (better still) 50mm waste pipe. The larger the bore the easier to pull cable through it. Any sort of sharp turn is going to create a lot of friction as the cable under tension rubs and heats up the plastic of the tube where contact at bends is made. If you understand the physics then you'll realise that pulling something around a 90 degree bend means that very little of the pull force is transferred to the cable feeding in from source end. This can make it incredibly difficult to pull cable past any 90 degree bends.

If you can manage it, put trap doors in the floor boards at either end of the conduit run and then use a single straight piece attached to the underside of the floor joists. If you have to use bends then have no single bend more than a 45 degree angle. 2x 45's separated by a 20cm straight piece will make it a lot easier to pull the cable.


Wiring the Asus-5300: The WAN port is an Ethernet connection from one of the VM hub's Ethernet ports. What you need then is a run of Ethernet cable from the understairs location to the spare room.

Wireless vs Ethernet: You're right in considering adding the access point and running Ethernet cable to any fixed devices. Decent Cat5e should be able to run at Gigabit speeds up to 100m but it isn't certified (isn't guaranteed, if you like) for those higher speeds. For the relatively small difference in price I tend to run Cat6. The Gigabit length isn't too different (both around 100m) but Cat6 is cetified for Gigabit at 100m, and will generally 10 Gigabit up to 50m so long as it is installed and terminated correctly. This makes it a bit more future-proofed.

Cat6a is the next higher spec up. This will do 10 Gig @ 100m. Unless your house is huge then you're unlikely to need those sorts of lengths, and this makes Cat6a a bit OTT for domestic installs. Go for Cat6 instead.

The only thing to be aware of with Cat6 and better cables is that they need more careful handling and sympathetic installation. As the data speeds increase then so does the frequency running through the cable. Cat6 has a cable separator inside to keep the twisted pairs away from each other. This helps reduce cross-talk which becomes a problem as data rates/frequencies increase. If you bend these kinds of cables around too tight a radius then the separation gets knackered and so the speed of the cable is compromised. Without getting too technical, if you have to turn a corner with Cat6 then the bend shouldn't be any tighter than the equivalent of going around a coffee mug. Also, don't have any single bend more than 90 degrees.

Network cabling infrastructure: Since you have your fancy wireless router which includes sophisticated firewall protection then you probably want all of your network sitting behind that. However, running all the Ethernet cables upstairs might be a bit of a headache, so a multiport Ethernet switch located under the stairs might be a better solution. To me then that would suggest two Ethernet from the understairs location to the Asus. One provides the WAN connection from the VM hub. The other comes from a single Ethernet port on the Asus and then feeds the network switch. All your wired Ethernet devices then plug in to the switch.

 

[FunkMaster]

Conduit for the VM cable: Use 40mm or (better still) 50mm waste pipe. The larger the bore the easier to pull cable through it. Any sort of sharp turn is going to create a lot of friction as the cable under tension rubs and heats up the plastic of the tube where contact at bends is made. If you understand the physics then you'll realise that pulling something around a 90 degree bend means that very little of the pull force is transferred to the cable feeding in from source end. This can make it incredibly difficult to pull cable past any 90 degree bends.

If you can manage it, put trap doors in the floor boards at either end of the conduit run and then use a single straight piece attached to the underside of the floor joists. If you have to use bends then have no single bend more than a 45 degree angle. 2x 45's separated by a 20cm straight piece will make it a lot easier to pull the cable.

Thanks man, I was actually just trying to work out how thick the Conduit needs to be and I think you have answered that question.

I came across this:
50mm Waste Pipe (3m) - http://www.screwfix.com/p/floplast-solvent-weld-pipes-white-50mm-x-3m/88188

Then taking into consideration the bends, well I really only have one that I need to take care of which is a 90 degree turn, but as I am laying this stuff under the floor boards, I have some flex around how it looks down there, so thought of this:

http://www.screwfix.com/p/floplast-solvent-weld-bend-135-white-50mm/29473 or http://www.screwfix.com/p/floplast-solvent-weld-bend-92-5-white-50mm/96439 .... Guess I need to think about the physics aspect a little more.

I basically have to:
From under the stairs, it's about 1.5 / 2m to the entrance to the lounge, then a right turn and about another 1.5m to the middle of the wall.

I then am thinking of chasing conduit into the wall cavity ... again posed with the question of ... how thick. I was reading and watched some video of where a guy put 3 conduit lines in, one per cable ....

Wireless vs Ethernet: You're right in considering adding the access point and running Ethernet cable to any fixed devices. Decent Cat5e should be able to run at Gigabit speeds up to 100m but it isn't certified (isn't guaranteed, if you like) for those higher speeds. For the relatively small difference in price I tend to run Cat6. The Gigabit length isn't too different (both around 100m) but Cat6 is cetified for Gigabit at 100m, and will generally 10 Gigabit up to 50m so long as it is installed and terminated correctly. This makes it a bit more future-proofed.

Cat6a is the next higher spec up. This will do 10 Gig @ 100m. Unless your house is huge then you're unlikely to need those sorts of lengths, and this makes Cat6a a bit OTT for domestic installs. Go for Cat6 instead.

The only thing to be aware of with Cat6 and better cables is that they need more careful handling and sympathetic installation. As the data speeds increase then so does the frequency running through the cable. Cat6 has a cable separator inside to keep the twisted pairs away from each other. This helps reduce cross-talk which becomes a problem as data rates/frequencies increase. If you bend these kinds of cables around too tight a radius then the separation gets knackered and so the speed of the cable is compromised. Without getting too technical, if you have to turn a corner with Cat6 then the bend shouldn't be any tighter than the equivalent of going around a coffee mug. Also, don't have any single bend more than 90 degrees.

Thanks for this .... I been reading about CAT5e, 6/6a and even bloody 7. I think I will just go with Cat6 and if I read correctly, un-shielded otherwise need to earth it.

It sounds like the Cat6 cable needs to be treated like the VM cable .... with a little care ...

This is the Cable I was thinking of.
https://www.blackbox.co.uk/gb-gb/fi/1235/11408/GigaTrue-CAT6-UTP-550MHz-Solid-Bulk-Cable/

Network cabling infrastructure: Since you have your fancy wireless router which includes sophisticated firewall protection then you probably want all of your network sitting behind that. However, running all the Ethernet cables upstairs might be a bit of a headache, so a multiport Ethernet switch located under the stairs might be a better solution. To me then that would suggest two Ethernet from the understairs location to the Asus. One provides the WAN connection from the VM hub. The other comes from a single Ethernet port on the Asus and then feeds the network switch. All your wired Ethernet devices then plug in to the switch.

As I have been reading more and more (the budget has gone up with it) ... In essence I am now looking at something along the lines of:

Patch Panel + Switch + Power Strip and 6u or 9u Cabinet

So ... Virgin from street through hole into Wall coming out under the stairs.
Isolator cable into the Hub + Split to go into the Waste Pipe and then up into the Conduit up the wall to a face place (need to figure out what face plate is compatible / right)
Ethernet from Hub to Switch that connects to the patch panel; from patch panel a ethernet line down to the Tivo Box + 2 more for PS4 + AppleTV.
Then what you described for upstairs sounds pretty good!

 

[Lucid]

Thanks man, I was actually just trying to work out how thick the Conduit needs to be and I think you have answered that question.

I came across this:
50mm Waste Pipe (3m) - http://www.screwfix.com/p/floplast-solvent-weld-pipes-white-50mm-x-3m/88188

Then taking into consideration the bends, well I really only have one that I need to take care of which is a 90 degree turn, but as I am laying this stuff under the floor boards, I have some flex around how it looks down there, so thought of this:

http://www.screwfix.com/p/floplast-solvent-weld-bend-135-white-50mm/29473 or http://www.screwfix.com/p/floplast-solvent-weld-bend-92-5-white-50mm/96439 .... Guess I need to think about the physics aspect a little more.

I basically have to:
From under the stairs, it's about 1.5 / 2m to the entrance to the lounge, then a right turn and about another 1.5m to the middle of the wall.

Go with 2x 135 bends (they're measuring from the other side of the angle i.e 180 - 45 = 135). Two of those 135's with a 30cm length in between will give you the 90 degree bend on a gentler radius curve. That's what you want. Don't go with the 92.5 degree bend. The cable will be a bastard to pull.

Personally I wouldn't chase 50mm diameter conduit in to a domestic wall. It's a hell of a size to bury. In fact, the whole conduit/pulling/chasing idea is OTT. Why not just buy the triple shielded coax that VM should be supplying* and run that. No more worrying about pulling through conduit, and it'll be a lot simpler to conceal. What you want is Webro HD100. It's available to purchase in 10/20/30m runs at roughly £1.50 down to £1.00 per metre.

* I say "should be supplying" because I heard on the grapevine that they've gone cheap.

VM (and possibly NTL before them) has always made a big fuss about the triple shielding of their cables. That's understandable; unlike Freeview or Sky where the signal passes through air to the aerial or dish, with cable your home is directly connected to the distribution network's local node, and from their to your neighbours houses and the VM distribution centre. Any sources of interference in your home can be picked up by the VM network if a poorly shielded cable or connector is used. That's why VM specifies a triple shielded cable.

The HD100 in the link above uses two copper foils sandwiching a braided layer. Foil is good a blocking very high frequency interference but not good for stopping low frequency noise. That's partly why the braid is there. The other reason for the braid is that foil isn't a good conductor but braid is. The cable needs a good conductive shield layer because the noise being trapped is a form of energy, and that energy has to go somewhere, so the shield acts as a path to an earthing point.

You'll notice if you look at the picture of HD100 from the link that the braid and foils and centre conductor in that cable are all made from copper. That's important because copper is a good electrical conductor. Good TV and Satellite coax (WF100, TX100, PF100) all use copper for the core and shield. Cheap coaxes use aluminium braid over Mylar foil (yep, the same stuff crisp packets are made from) and a centre conductor made of steel with a thin flash of copper anodising to help prevent rust. Aluminium and steel and metalised plastic don't conduct as well as copper. I've heard that VM have been using an aluminium/Mylar triple shielded cable for some time now. What this means is that if you buy HD100 then you're using something better than VM, so as long as you haven't kinked or trapped the cable there can be no complaints when the engineer calls to install.

Thanks for this .... I been reading about CAT5e, 6/6a and even bloody 7. I think I will just go with Cat6 and if I read correctly, un-shielded otherwise need to earth it.

It sounds like the Cat6 cable needs to be treated like the VM cable .... with a little care ...

This is the Cable I was thinking of.
https://www.blackbox.co.uk/gb-gb/fi/1235/11408/GigaTrue-CAT6-UTP-550MHz-Solid-Bulk-Cable/

Yep, you only really need shielded if the environment is excessively noisy - lots of RF interference. As long as it's solid copper conductors (good) as opposed to aluminium (bad) then that cable looks fine.

As I have been reading more and more (the budget has gone up with it) ... In essence I am now looking at something along the lines of:

Patch Panel + Switch + Power Strip and 6u or 9u Cabinet

The patch panel, power distribution strip and rack cabinet makes sense of you're planning to network the whole house. So far though you've only mentioned a games console, Apple TV, Tivo, Asus router and the VM hub. TBH a desktop 8 port switch would handle all that and still leave 3 ports spare. If we presume you'll have a couple of TVs with smart features and maybe a NAS drive that isn't connected directly to the router then you've still only filled an 8 port switch. You could do what you need with a small living room wall cabinet, a 4 way extension lead, and a desktop network switch. You don't have to spend a lot of money unless you want to.

So ... Virgin from street through hole into Wall coming out under the stairs.
Isolator cable into the Hub + Split to go into the Waste Pipe and then up into the Conduit up the wall to a face place (need to figure out what face plate is compatible / right)
Ethernet from Hub to Switch that connects to the patch panel; from patch panel a ethernet line down to the Tivo Box + 2 more for PS4 + AppleTV.
Then what you described for upstairs sounds pretty good!

I'd avoid faceplates on the VM coax cable run. They're just a potential point of weakness. Go for a brush plate instead LINK and hide the surplus cable in-wall. You can buy these in various finishes. The rest of it sounds about right. IIRC the VM incoming cable splits at a T junction. One output feeds the Tivo, the other feeds the hub for internet access. The rest is Cat cable wiring.


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[FunkMaster]

Go with 2x 135 bends (they're measuring from the other side of the angle i.e 180 - 45 = 135). Two of those 135's with a 30cm length in between will give you the 90 degree bend on a gentler radius curve. That's what you want. Don't go with the 92.5 degree bend. The cable will be a bastard to pull.

Thanks - I'll stick with that and as it's all under the floorboards, won't make much difference how it looks, as long as it's functional.

Personally I wouldn't chase 50mm diameter conduit in to a domestic wall. It's a hell of a size to bury. In fact, the whole conduit/pulling/chasing idea is OTT.

I certainly wasn't planning on chasing a 50mm pipe into the wall, but was somehow thinking that the 50mm would come to a point where the wall is and from there have smaller conduits (20mm; two or three side by side that go up the wall Cavity into the Brush Plate.

I get that it's OTT, but it is cleaner (visually) and my thought behind doing it all in conduit, is that if for what ever reason I switch back from Virgin to Sky, the conduit is there and can have cables re-run. There is also that safety aspect of "What if the cable you run, doesn't work and you need to replace it.

Remember I am running this all under floor boards (old pine) and when I am done, we have having this covered with engineered hardwood; so this is a once and done job for me ....

What you want is Webro HD100

. It's available to purchase in 10/20/30m runs at roughly £1.50 down to £1.00 per metre.

WOW ... this stuff looks the business indeed. Thanks for sharing that!

Just so I understand where this is used in the puzzle:

This runs from the Hub (splitter) to the IEC cable into the Tivo

The Reference diagram for the puzzle
https://my.virginmedia.com/content/...-TV-V6-QuickStart-Guide-for-New-Customers.pdf

Out of interest; can this WD100 be used to run Sky too? - so if I switched from Virgin to Sky, that's two cables I believe from the dish, I presume it's the same cable, but two of them?

The patch panel, power distribution strip and rack cabinet makes sense of you're planning to network the whole house. So far though you've only mentioned a games console, Apple TV, Tivo, Asus router and the VM hub. TBH a desktop 8 port switch would handle all that and still leave 3 ports spare. If we presume you'll have a couple of TVs with smart features and maybe a NAS drive that isn't connected directly to the router then you've still only filled an 8 port switch. You could do what you need with a small living room wall cabinet, a 4 way extension lead, and a desktop network switch. You don't have to spend a lot of money unless you want to.

There is an element of me thinking ahead and future proofing as no doubt, in a few years we will be extending and I don't want to be coming back to this foundational work then.

In the lounge:
TV - Currently a Samsung, but thinking of going up to a newer UHD model (either LG or Samsung) - 55" | WiFi (don't use many of those smart features as most are on Tivo/PS4 or AppleTV)
Tivo | Ethernet
PS4 | Ethernet
AppleTV | Ethernet

In the Data Cabinet
I do have a QNAP NAS drive that I would hard wire into the Patch Panel (leave it under the stairs too)

In the office:
For the mean time, WIFI will suffice for now ... but it will get networked.

Generally -

I will be looking to get other parts of the house networked and hence saw the patch panel as the way to do this.

I'd avoid faceplates on the VM coax cable run. They're just a potential point of weakness. Go for a brush plate instead LINK and hide the surplus cable in-wall. You can buy these in various finishes. The rest of it sounds about right. IIRC the VM incoming cable splits at a T junction. One output feeds the Tivo, the other feeds the hub for internet access. The rest is Cat cable wiring.

Brush Plate it is ... SOLD, my wife likes the look too!

What is IIRC mean? Keep reading it as Internet Relay Chat from the old days .....

 

[Lucid]

I'm not sure you're seeing the whole picture. HD100 is better than the stuff VM are currently using.I think you can do away with the conduit under the floor from the C&W box location to the Comms Cupboard under the stairs.

So here's how it plays out. You chase out the wall down from the C&W box to floor level and install some conduit. Do the same from floor level up to whatever cabinet you decide to use. Run the HD100 in the conduit up and down the walls but don't bother with conduit under the floor. The VM installer will terminate both ends. You can ask him to remove the C&W box so that the cable end can be put in the conduit and hidden. You can run two cables if you want to have a back-up.

You'll also need a run of HD100 from the under-stairs to where the VM Tivo will live which will be near the lounge TV.

All of the above presumes that VM are sticking with coax from the street in to your house. You need to check this. If they're installing fibre then it's back to the drawing board with the under floor conduit.

... and my thought behind doing it all in conduit, is that if for what ever reason I switch back from Virgin to Sky, the conduit is there and can have cables re-run. There is also that safety aspect of "What if the cable you run, doesn't work and you need to replace it."

Remember I am running this all under floor boards (old pine) and when I am done, we have having this covered with engineered hardwood; so this is a once and done job for me ....

Sky's wiring topology is different to VM and different again to terrestrial TV (Freeview). The cable you're running from the old C&W box location won't have any use for Sky. It's in the wrong place.

You have Sky at the moment, so you can see how they wire from the south-facing dish to the main recorder location with 2 coax cables. If you want to provide some degree of future-proofing should you ever wish to return to Sky then the simplest way is to have the two wire connection from the dish going to your most likely recorder location.

Yes, HD100 will work for Sky and for terrestrial too. It is just a better shielded version of Webro WF100. That's not the issue though; it's where the cables run from and to.

Your VM topology is based on having a Comms Cupboard under the stairs. Unless you plan to fit a Sky recorder under the stairs in the future (which is do-able if you then distribute the HDMI signal via IP or HDMI-Cat cable baluns or HDMI-over-coax) then, unless there's something else you're not telling us, I can't see a good reason to bring the Sky LNB cable feeds in under the stairs only to have them then go out again to the recorder location. Yes, you could use one (or both) of the HD100's you plan to run for the VM Tivo feed, but unless the Sky LNB feed happens to pass through the under-stairs cupboard already then I can't see a good reason to go out of your way simply to double up on the potential use of a bit of coax.

Thinking and planning ahead is a good thing, but we only have a limited amount of forward knowledge on which to make those plans. 1080p HD is well established and there's hardware and cabling around to deal with that fairly cost-effectively. We're also at the beginning phase of 4K becoming mainstream. Sky has a bit of 4K content. Virgin doesn't really unless you count Netflix and Amazon content accessed via the Tivo. I can't see Freeview getting lots of 4K unless something amazing happens with compression algorithms to fit a 4K stream in the place occupied by a 1080i channel. So it looks like the future of 4K rests mostly with download; Sky and VM will bring up the rear once they get their acts together. Freeview is probably a non-starter.

What this means is that networking will be important. Wireless is improving, but a bit of wire is still king. Sky Q's download times are halved changing from 5GHz wireless to Gigabit Ethernet. (BTW, Sky, Netflix, Amazon and YouTube all carry very aggressively-compacted 4K signals compared to 4K Blu-ray).

I think if you provision for the following then you'll have most of your bases covered:

1x HD100 coax - Comms Cupboard to lounge TV location - this for the VM Tivo box
1x HD100 or Webro WF100 coax from the TV aerial to the lounge TV location - this for a Freeview recorder and to loop to the TV to use Freeview as a back-up if ever VM or Sky goes on the blink
1x additional HD100 from Comms Cupboard to lounge TV location as a back-up cable
2x WF100 from the satellite dish direct to the lounge TV location - this exclusively for feeding a Sky recorder
4-6 Cat6 Ethernet cables - to enable smart features on TV, media player(s), BD player etc plus to use as a pair with a Cat/HDMI balun system if ever required

On the basis of the above then a patch panel starts to make sense.

Incidentally, the VM Tivo has an Ethernet port but it isn't used for web access. It provides a link to a second VM box for multi-room and/or a way to use the control app from a tablet or smart phone. Tivo accesses web content via the coax connection.


Oh yes, IIRC.......... If I Recall Correctly


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[FunkMaster]

Super big thanks, especially for taking the time out of your day to answer my thread post. I think my questions are answered and as you said; it takes a fair amount of thinking to get it right.

Your shopping list .... is pretty much what I ordered today; except the WF100 (will grab some of that now).

I have some other questions about HDMI and Power cords ... but will start a new thread for that.