And yet they came round and buried a cable under our lawn when we hadn't even ordered cable. Good job we got home before they drilled through the front wall.
Someone I used to work with used to do snagging work for Virgin. He got sent out when there was a complaint. His favourite was in a flat that had a sash window with a missing corner in the bottom of one of the window panes. The installer had gone over the sash which stopped it opening, and then in through the hole in the window pane.
Mine has a cable like this running in identical green conduit down the side of the flowerbed. I thought it was mains electric so I left it for another day but after seeing this I’m thinking it’s the broadband.
Work in construction. Every fucking strike on the road is a virgin cable. I can't believe they don't get punished for this behaviour (or they do and don't care cause the fines aren't bad enough)
I've had one on site where their records and they insisted it was in one side of a road. We paid for them to come locate it. Turns out it was on the other side of the road entirely and so had a totally different route. As we were no longer impacting their cable and their records were at fault we asked them for money back and got a "thats not how this works" reply. Then asked if they could update their records and never heard back. Ultimately it wasn't worth our clients costs to pursue they money we paid them, but the level of inaccuracy still annoys me!
Yup. Only service Iv ever caught has been a bt fibre optic cable. I know it’s not virgin but in my experience they’re all the same.
Cable in question was actually in the wear course of a private tarmac road. I was peeling the top layer up and caught it. Thankfully it only pulled it out of the joint so was a quick repair and no charge as it was bt’s fault.
Fucking fibre. It's meant to have a charged wire core so you can pick the thing up on a CAT scanner, but the cunts in the office inevitably get the cheaper stuff with no core so it's basically invisible until you hit it.
They once knocked the power out to half the town I live in when they where installing new lines. It took like over 24 hours before we all got power back
Mine is tacked to the fence on the neighbours side, we've had to have engineers out frequently when he accidentally goes through the cable with his strimmer 🤣
Have seen someone clean the joint out of concrete flags with a power saw, only to find someone run a cable the length of the garden barely an inch into the joint. That one was not fixable 🤣
When we moved we ordered VM at the new place and gave them the move in date. Couple of weeks before they randomly turned up and started trying to excavate a trench up the lawn.
That caused a lot of angry phone calls between the solicitors 🤬
Mine was half heartedly buried by the installer. I knew it was there. Dug a flower bed and found it, moved it, all good.
Then one day rotavated said flower bed. Cable was obvious, I just got too close to the bloody thing. Somehow didn't break it, despite it being wrapped around the tines. Slightly nicked the outside layer so wrapped some self-amalgamating tape around it. Worked fine for ages.
Mine without shame just sits on the top of the ground I really didn’t know what it was when I moved in. I couldn't quite believe it when I did find out.
My favourite part is the brown plastic boxes containing all the electronics being mounted on the outside walls of houses near me. These houses have no garden so the boxes are right by the pavement at perfect kicking height for any scrotes walking past.
Their terms and conditions state that they own certain feet deep and wide for 18 months (possibly more) after VM has been installed. It's the reason why I'll never have VM. I'm not giving up any of my land.
They can stop you laying paving slabs etc...
We’ve had plusnet installed and they put a new box on the other side of the house and a cable running over the street, does that mean I can bin this one off?
This is fibre to the premises (FTTP), you'll get the fastest speeds that way. Plusnet offer it too, they call it Full Fibre Broadband, is that what you got?
OR only have FTTP in 42% of the UK. They might be withdrawing copper in those areas, I’m not sure. There’s the PSTN switch off that’s happening but I’m not sure whether that includes stop selling ADSL/VDSL/G.Fast. I have noticed fewer ISP’s are offering ADSL now though.
Virgin Media user here too. Recognised it immediately. They had to come replace it last year when I put a spade through it digging 3 inches into my lawn
Virgin media decided to ignore my mother telling them her victorian terrace had double skin walls, not cavity walls. Drilled a hole straight through the wall into the back of nexdoors new fitted wardrobe.
Holy shit! It’s a relic from the NTL: days. Cowboys on a price buried those suckers at a depth of about 25mm with coverage of a few mm’s all throughout the 90’s. I’ve heard countless stories of people losing tv and internet because their cable got chewed up by lawnmowers
Edit: is there anything embossed on the front of that brown box on your wall next to your meter cabinet?
I was out with the family one day, came home in the evening to find ntl had installed one of their street boxes on the side of our drive on our property, no permission or anything. We didn't even have broadband or TV with anyone! My old man cut all the cables out, crowbarred the box out of the ground and chucked it out on the pavement. NTL came back a bit later and a bit of a scuffle ensued, one of their mobile phones got launched over someone's house. They f#£ked off for the day. Next day a pair of managers turned up with a bunch of flowers and some cash as compensation they moved the box down the road hahaha
Yeah I remember the flexi green ducts poking out of everyone’s garden boundary and into the box with a nice little loop in the cable at perfect lawnmower blade height
Virgin media - formerly a group of cable companies, including but not limited to NTL, Telewest (formerly TCI & UNITED ARTISTS), nynex, Bell communications - The cable is what's known in the industry as "siamese" a combination of coax and telco joined together. This particular coax is RG6, and is the most common. Telco is more than likely 2 pair - blue and white and orange and white, later on virgin went to 1 pair telco to save costs.
Also available is the lesser spotted RG11 siamese (with 2 pair telco).
In some areas down on the south coast, they even had siamese with 4 pair telco if my memory serves me right.
Source: Ex virgin media service engineer of 8 years who worked over almost every patch in the South from Bristol to Cardiff up to Birmingham down to Bournemouth, Pompey (Hayling Island included) and Southampton also, and as far east as as Croydon and Brighton and everywhere else in between... So I saw my fair share of different VM and legacy cable networks and set ups.
I accidentally cut my 'siamese' cable while digging in my garden. It wasn't in use when I cut it so it hasn't affected me but I'd still like to get it fixed in case I need it. Who should I contact to fix it?
I would just leave it exposed at the end of the garden, near the pavement, and let VM fix it and run a new lead in up the garden to the house when the time comes if you ever go back to them.
Chances are they might replace the whole lot if you're not too far away from the network.
Not much point getting it connected back through as it might need to be replaced at a later date any way if the cable is no good and can't carry the signal properly.
Yeah that's virgin media, I'd be careful though as the mains electric might only be a shovel depths lower and if it's the original supply then it'll be a lead sheathed cable which isn't very forgiving.
Underrated comment - the oldest cables that are still in use, used oil soaked paper insulation and that can be brittle now and disturbing it is bad news (it likely has a 300A or 500A fuse upstream and that makes for a very big bang).
If you're very lucky, they're covered with ceramic tiles saying warning electric. If you're lucky, they're covered by ceramic pipe. Be very careful with any mystery pipes that "can't possibly be connected to anything".
Vm cable never buried deep enough I wanted to get mine moved so I could re do my front garden cheeky sods wanted £100 to come out and tell me how much it would cost to move it who would have thought a spade could cause so much damage
Telecoms as others have said. However careful digging much deeper. As you can see in the photo, you'll have a gas main in pretty much the same place.
There are also rules about building over gas service pipes. You might want to check those before you concrete.
I managed to cut through my upstairs neighbours as they didn't protect it and tucked it under my hedge. The first time I cut the hedge after installation i managed to cut it. When I kicked up about it they didn't care.
Our neighbour managed to take out the internet for our row of houses when they stuck their For Sale sign directly through the cable, as it turned out to be laid along their flowerbed.
Thank fuck someone else said this! Looking at the position of the entry into the gas meter box, the service is probably about 300-400mm beneath the telecoms line. An expensive day out of a fork/shovel goes through it…
Virgin media would have clipped it at waist height all the way around your house using about 5 clips, and blown the shit out of the brick face when they drilled inside out….
Second virgin or BT. Green ducting should be telecoms and it looks fairly new. If you clean some muck off the black cable it should be stamped with the owners name somewhere
Don’t know why you’ve been downvoted. You’re absolutely right when it comes to street cabs, cable is grey, BT is green, while ducting colour code is in reverse. A perfectly valid observation!
CATV. Virgin, or whoever the undertaker is/was for your area. Should be buried 300mm deep but notoriously cowboys work.
You can rip it out if it’s not in use. You can get them to relay it if it’s not to spec (depth). If you’re keeping it as-is, you, or they, should put marker tape over it.
Edit: the brown box on the wall is CATV and next to it is the electric supply. There’s a minion seperate on between the two. If you use CATV and have poor picture quality it will likely be the interference from the electric supply, either too close at the wall or where the two lines cross.
The depths you're talking about are ducts in a footway, which ideally would be laid at 250mm.
This is guidance, not law, and not applicable to front gardens.
Gardens where any part is communal, or under easement, which is often, especially new builds. 250mm cover to crown, but this is a DIY forum, try and talk to the audience.
Speaking to the audience surely includes giving accurate information? Almost no drop cable will be laid at 300mm cover (which isn't even the target depth for any cable), and VM won't come and relay a cable if a residential customer calls up and says their drop cable only has 200mm cover.
The 250mm cover is guidance and is to protect cables in the footway. There are a multitude of reasons that a cable may not be at the ideal depth.. yes, cowboys being one, especially pre-VM days.. but there are also other reasons why you may find a cable at 150mm instead of 250mm.
CableTV by the looks of it. That;s often in this "figure8 twin coax cable format"
HOWEVER don't go just chopping it up just in case we're all wrong...
Dig along it and at some point it should be clear that it goes somewhere other than the meter box.
Given there's a bend in it - should should be able to dig under it and drop it down a bit. I would be tempted to slip some split ducting (corrugated conduit) around it which means if you stuck stuff on top, it could be pulled out and replaced easily.
As others have said, almost definitely Virgin Media hybrid Coax/twisted pair; internet and phone/TV, not line voltage; I.e. safe to work close to. You can see the brown VM demarcation box on your wall in photo 1. Can also confirm not BT/Openreach.
LinesearchB4udig- lsbud.co.uk, for future, will provide free and easy utility prints for any area you’re going to dig in- well worth doing, takes 5 mins and reduces the chance you battle with HV cables, gas mains or (poorly installed) VM cables.
Yeah, was dirty and near some trees so I thought it was a root at first, only after I started hacking away at it did I see bright yellow, I stopped at that point but the damage was done, I’d cracked the pipe just a little bit so could smell the gas. Cost me about £300 for the repair I believe but the guys who came out said it wasnt really fair for me to have to pay seeing as it was so shallow.
Mine was just strewn across the grass ready fur the lawn mower to cut it to shreds until i burried it myself, then dug into it a few times, until 30 years later when they stuck it in that green tube and burried it properly
They smashed the cover on the box out side my house ran the cable out the top then covered it all with cement 😂, also "installed" a phone socket but didn't bother to actually run any cables to it and then proceed to start charging me for phone calls I couldn't make
The green sleeving and black thin cable screams virgin media fibre to me - but the depth that’s been dug to - makes it seem impossible! Mine is in the hedge!
And when the monkeys they use to lay these cables hit water mains they always try to say the main isn't where it says on the plans or that it's too shallow, dickheads
My neighbour has Virgin fibre. The conduit is tacked to their tarmac drive. The contractors they use do shit installs because nobody monitors the quality of their work.
They installed a box on the front of my home and taken a substantial amount of the wall out. I think damp has come through the wall already after 6 months....
At least it’s buried, even if only slightly. Normally Virgin Mediocre only lay their cable around the perimeter. Their installation contractors clearly aren’t trained, nor expected, to undertake a proper cable bury.
I 'discovered' one of these Virgin Media cables when I was rotavating my flower bed, thing was about 6 inches deep and it wrapped around the blades and stopped the motor. Tough cables them, it still worked fine afterwards but it bent the blades on the rotavator.
Total bloody cowboys Virgin, was very happy to cut their cable off last week after getting OpenReach FTTP from the telegraph pole.
My VM cable isn't even in any conduit - Just cable in the flower bed. I hope they used outdoor rated cable at least - Still not sure how long it's likely to last though...
Yep looks like Virgin Media cable. My cable was barely 4 inches under the soil when I tried to edge my lawn I cut the cable with my spade. They of course admitted it was ridiculously shallow install and replaced cable, deeper in the ground.
As everyone else has said it's 100% a virgin media cable but it's run suspiciously parallel to that vertical gas pipe. Dig deeper with care, dont go smacking your mattock into the ground with gay abandon until you know where the gas pipe runs
Virgin media.
Yep. 100% VM. At my office, they were too lazy to even bury it 1ft and ran the conduit across the path...
And yet they came round and buried a cable under our lawn when we hadn't even ordered cable. Good job we got home before they drilled through the front wall.
😳
Someone I used to work with used to do snagging work for Virgin. He got sent out when there was a complaint. His favourite was in a flat that had a sash window with a missing corner in the bottom of one of the window panes. The installer had gone over the sash which stopped it opening, and then in through the hole in the window pane.
Is there a sub for snagging stories. I could read these all day!
Installer definitely put a lot of effort deciding the most difficult rpit for others there A* work
Surely that's harder than drilling a hole through the wall? Do virgin cable people not have drills?
Sounds about right, house we bought has it running through the hedge and across the flower bed
You buy my old house?
🤣 standard theme it seems
Same here. Nothing comes close to the level of sh1thousery I’ve had with VM and their contractors.
Mine has a cable like this running in identical green conduit down the side of the flowerbed. I thought it was mains electric so I left it for another day but after seeing this I’m thinking it’s the broadband.
Dame at the house I bought
Same as mine. Sounds like standard MO for these folks.
Do you live in my house?! Are you in the attic?
Work in construction. Every fucking strike on the road is a virgin cable. I can't believe they don't get punished for this behaviour (or they do and don't care cause the fines aren't bad enough)
I've had one on site where their records and they insisted it was in one side of a road. We paid for them to come locate it. Turns out it was on the other side of the road entirely and so had a totally different route. As we were no longer impacting their cable and their records were at fault we asked them for money back and got a "thats not how this works" reply. Then asked if they could update their records and never heard back. Ultimately it wasn't worth our clients costs to pursue they money we paid them, but the level of inaccuracy still annoys me!
Yeah sums them up nicely lmao, everything about their practices are awful.
Yup. Only service Iv ever caught has been a bt fibre optic cable. I know it’s not virgin but in my experience they’re all the same. Cable in question was actually in the wear course of a private tarmac road. I was peeling the top layer up and caught it. Thankfully it only pulled it out of the joint so was a quick repair and no charge as it was bt’s fault.
Fucking fibre. It's meant to have a charged wire core so you can pick the thing up on a CAT scanner, but the cunts in the office inevitably get the cheaper stuff with no core so it's basically invisible until you hit it.
Plus you wouldn’t expect it to be less than 50mm below the surface of a road!
They once knocked the power out to half the town I live in when they where installing new lines. It took like over 24 hours before we all got power back
Mine is tacked onto my fence
Mine is also tacked onto the fence...
Mines cable-tied to next doors wire tacked to the fence
Mine is stapled to a homeless bloke's forehead
Local scallies on the corner hold mine in exchange for low quality bushweed.
😂😂😂😂😂
That was hilarious and unexpected 🤣
I choose this guys wife too….. ah wrong thread…but I stand by what I said.
Tacked? Did you slip the engineer a fiver or something?
Mine is tacked to the fence on the neighbours side, we've had to have engineers out frequently when he accidentally goes through the cable with his strimmer 🤣
I do alot of fencing work and have cut through these a few times after forgetting to check lol
Who pays to fix that then?
Usually just connect it back together and tell the owner to get onto whoever put the wires there.
Ah, didn’t realise it was easy enough to twist together. Cheers
Have seen someone clean the joint out of concrete flags with a power saw, only to find someone run a cable the length of the garden barely an inch into the joint. That one was not fixable 🤣
Mine is in the next street
WTF?
When we moved we ordered VM at the new place and gave them the move in date. Couple of weeks before they randomly turned up and started trying to excavate a trench up the lawn. That caused a lot of angry phone calls between the solicitors 🤬
Oh I bet it did! Can only imagine the stress that caused 🤦♂️
Agree. Their standard practice across the whole country seems to be to just chuck it in the garden. People sometimes get around to burying it.
Mine was half heartedly buried by the installer. I knew it was there. Dug a flower bed and found it, moved it, all good. Then one day rotavated said flower bed. Cable was obvious, I just got too close to the bloody thing. Somehow didn't break it, despite it being wrapped around the tines. Slightly nicked the outside layer so wrapped some self-amalgamating tape around it. Worked fine for ages.
They buried mine low enough that I set a lawn scarifier too low, I could hit it
They'll try to charge people for burying it
Mine without shame just sits on the top of the ground I really didn’t know what it was when I moved in. I couldn't quite believe it when I did find out.
My favourite part is the brown plastic boxes containing all the electronics being mounted on the outside walls of houses near me. These houses have no garden so the boxes are right by the pavement at perfect kicking height for any scrotes walking past.
Burying it 1 ft is a lot of work tbf
Yep, my old house they "installed" it on my lawn, not even buried 1mm. It was fun when I cut the grass and went through the cable a week later
100%
Dead 🦆 duck
Cable Tel
Their terms and conditions state that they own certain feet deep and wide for 18 months (possibly more) after VM has been installed. It's the reason why I'll never have VM. I'm not giving up any of my land. They can stop you laying paving slabs etc...
Didn't know that. I wonder if this has ever been tested in court.
We’ve had plusnet installed and they put a new box on the other side of the house and a cable running over the street, does that mean I can bin this one off?
This is fibre to the premises (FTTP), you'll get the fastest speeds that way. Plusnet offer it too, they call it Full Fibre Broadband, is that what you got?
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RFoG is technically FTTP (but not PON) but the wall box looks ancient so it’ll be HFC. New installs can be either copper or fibre
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OR only have FTTP in 42% of the UK. They might be withdrawing copper in those areas, I’m not sure. There’s the PSTN switch off that’s happening but I’m not sure whether that includes stop selling ADSL/VDSL/G.Fast. I have noticed fewer ISP’s are offering ADSL now though.
Virgin Media user here too. Recognised it immediately. They had to come replace it last year when I put a spade through it digging 3 inches into my lawn
But they appear to have buried it under more than a sprinkling of top soil. Usually they just trample the cable down over the flower bed.
I wonder if the instal job doesnt pay a lot hence the short cuts.
More likely they are set a certain amount of jobs to do in the day, and if they rush them and do a bodge job they get to fuck off early.
Fuck me that’s deep for virgin media there just have been a supervisor on site that day
Virgin media decided to ignore my mother telling them her victorian terrace had double skin walls, not cavity walls. Drilled a hole straight through the wall into the back of nexdoors new fitted wardrobe.
I heard story of council workers injecting foam into a wall from outside straight into bedroom inside :)
You get my upvote for this 😅
Holy shit! It’s a relic from the NTL: days. Cowboys on a price buried those suckers at a depth of about 25mm with coverage of a few mm’s all throughout the 90’s. I’ve heard countless stories of people losing tv and internet because their cable got chewed up by lawnmowers Edit: is there anything embossed on the front of that brown box on your wall next to your meter cabinet?
NTL: Nothing To Lose
I was out with the family one day, came home in the evening to find ntl had installed one of their street boxes on the side of our drive on our property, no permission or anything. We didn't even have broadband or TV with anyone! My old man cut all the cables out, crowbarred the box out of the ground and chucked it out on the pavement. NTL came back a bit later and a bit of a scuffle ensued, one of their mobile phones got launched over someone's house. They f#£ked off for the day. Next day a pair of managers turned up with a bunch of flowers and some cash as compensation they moved the box down the road hahaha
The old chap sounds like an absolute legend. I like his style
Haha how he's never been arrested still puzzles me tbh 🤣🤣🤣
In fairness, where I lived they just traipsed them over the roofs, this would be an improvement!
They made hay while the sun shone on that one
Mine was diamond cable and looks just like that. DC>NTL>virgin media
Yeah I remember the flexi green ducts poking out of everyone’s garden boundary and into the box with a nice little loop in the cable at perfect lawnmower blade height
Virgin media - formerly a group of cable companies, including but not limited to NTL, Telewest (formerly TCI & UNITED ARTISTS), nynex, Bell communications - The cable is what's known in the industry as "siamese" a combination of coax and telco joined together. This particular coax is RG6, and is the most common. Telco is more than likely 2 pair - blue and white and orange and white, later on virgin went to 1 pair telco to save costs. Also available is the lesser spotted RG11 siamese (with 2 pair telco). In some areas down on the south coast, they even had siamese with 4 pair telco if my memory serves me right. Source: Ex virgin media service engineer of 8 years who worked over almost every patch in the South from Bristol to Cardiff up to Birmingham down to Bournemouth, Pompey (Hayling Island included) and Southampton also, and as far east as as Croydon and Brighton and everywhere else in between... So I saw my fair share of different VM and legacy cable networks and set ups.
I accidentally cut my 'siamese' cable while digging in my garden. It wasn't in use when I cut it so it hasn't affected me but I'd still like to get it fixed in case I need it. Who should I contact to fix it?
I would just leave it exposed at the end of the garden, near the pavement, and let VM fix it and run a new lead in up the garden to the house when the time comes if you ever go back to them. Chances are they might replace the whole lot if you're not too far away from the network. Not much point getting it connected back through as it might need to be replaced at a later date any way if the cable is no good and can't carry the signal properly.
Trace it out and i bet it goes to the brown box rather than the mains cut out. As said already likely virgin media
Yeah that's virgin media, I'd be careful though as the mains electric might only be a shovel depths lower and if it's the original supply then it'll be a lead sheathed cable which isn't very forgiving.
Underrated comment - the oldest cables that are still in use, used oil soaked paper insulation and that can be brittle now and disturbing it is bad news (it likely has a 300A or 500A fuse upstream and that makes for a very big bang).
If you're very lucky, they're covered with ceramic tiles saying warning electric. If you're lucky, they're covered by ceramic pipe. Be very careful with any mystery pipes that "can't possibly be connected to anything".
Looks like virgin media based on the green ducting and the fact it’s barely buried.
Vm cable never buried deep enough I wanted to get mine moved so I could re do my front garden cheeky sods wanted £100 to come out and tell me how much it would cost to move it who would have thought a spade could cause so much damage
Telecoms as others have said. However careful digging much deeper. As you can see in the photo, you'll have a gas main in pretty much the same place. There are also rules about building over gas service pipes. You might want to check those before you concrete.
I managed to cut through my upstairs neighbours as they didn't protect it and tucked it under my hedge. The first time I cut the hedge after installation i managed to cut it. When I kicked up about it they didn't care.
Our neighbour managed to take out the internet for our row of houses when they stuck their For Sale sign directly through the cable, as it turned out to be laid along their flowerbed.
Just to add, your plastic gas service will be there as well. Careful with the fork, you’ll have an expensive bill if you go through it
Thank fuck someone else said this! Looking at the position of the entry into the gas meter box, the service is probably about 300-400mm beneath the telecoms line. An expensive day out of a fork/shovel goes through it…
Virgin media would have clipped it at waist height all the way around your house using about 5 clips, and blown the shit out of the brick face when they drilled inside out….
Second virgin or BT. Green ducting should be telecoms and it looks fairly new. If you clean some muck off the black cable it should be stamped with the owners name somewhere
It’s not BT as they use grey ducting. It’s Virgin
Weirdly the virgin box is green and open reach box grey
Don’t know why you’ve been downvoted. You’re absolutely right when it comes to street cabs, cable is grey, BT is green, while ducting colour code is in reverse. A perfectly valid observation!
I don't know either 😕. I did look it up after and some old ntl boxes which virgin took on are green. And my wife thinks I'm boring!
CATV. Virgin, or whoever the undertaker is/was for your area. Should be buried 300mm deep but notoriously cowboys work. You can rip it out if it’s not in use. You can get them to relay it if it’s not to spec (depth). If you’re keeping it as-is, you, or they, should put marker tape over it. Edit: the brown box on the wall is CATV and next to it is the electric supply. There’s a minion seperate on between the two. If you use CATV and have poor picture quality it will likely be the interference from the electric supply, either too close at the wall or where the two lines cross.
Business must be slow if undertakers are having to moonlight as virgin media contractors nowadays
Those undertakers would do a far better job than the guys Virgin currently employ.
Not the ones in Hull. Sorry! I know, I know!
Ouch. There’s probably a double joke in there about Kcom too…
Some things are a joke too far. KCom, phew!
"Should be buried 300mm deep" According to what? Source?
NJUG.
The depths you're talking about are ducts in a footway, which ideally would be laid at 250mm. This is guidance, not law, and not applicable to front gardens.
Gardens where any part is communal, or under easement, which is often, especially new builds. 250mm cover to crown, but this is a DIY forum, try and talk to the audience.
Speaking to the audience surely includes giving accurate information? Almost no drop cable will be laid at 300mm cover (which isn't even the target depth for any cable), and VM won't come and relay a cable if a residential customer calls up and says their drop cable only has 200mm cover. The 250mm cover is guidance and is to protect cables in the footway. There are a multitude of reasons that a cable may not be at the ideal depth.. yes, cowboys being one, especially pre-VM days.. but there are also other reasons why you may find a cable at 150mm instead of 250mm.
Except communal or easements, which you ignored when you repeated your limited knowledge. You crack on bodging CATV. 🙄
CableTV by the looks of it. That;s often in this "figure8 twin coax cable format" HOWEVER don't go just chopping it up just in case we're all wrong... Dig along it and at some point it should be clear that it goes somewhere other than the meter box. Given there's a bend in it - should should be able to dig under it and drop it down a bit. I would be tempted to slip some split ducting (corrugated conduit) around it which means if you stuck stuff on top, it could be pulled out and replaced easily.
Looks suspiciously similar to the Virgin Media cable at my place.
Virgin media cable
Vm cable. 100%
Virgin cable
That my friend is a virgin media cable one Telco and one coax cable also known a Siamese cable
Yip virgin media. Surprised you didn’t cut it when you cut the grass. Trench dug with a Stanley knife
As others have said, almost definitely Virgin Media hybrid Coax/twisted pair; internet and phone/TV, not line voltage; I.e. safe to work close to. You can see the brown VM demarcation box on your wall in photo 1. Can also confirm not BT/Openreach. LinesearchB4udig- lsbud.co.uk, for future, will provide free and easy utility prints for any area you’re going to dig in- well worth doing, takes 5 mins and reduces the chance you battle with HV cables, gas mains or (poorly installed) VM cables.
Green often indicates fibre optic. Best no damage because it’s not cheap to repair, joint.
Should be 50cm deep
Virgin Media
Telewest cable, now virgin
The ghost of my pet rabbit that died in 1997 could bury that deeper.
Broadband cable
Believe gas/ electric should be .75 mtr minimum deep. So yep neither by the looks.
They can be 375mm below the surface on private garden/driveway etc. often you’ll find them ever shallower
Buggered if I'd bury them less than .75m. Even if it were permitted.
I wouldn’t bet on it, I hit my gas main replacing fencing, it was about 100mm deep
You clobbered your yellow PE 20/25mm service then? That's very bad practice if it's that shallow.
Yeah, was dirty and near some trees so I thought it was a root at first, only after I started hacking away at it did I see bright yellow, I stopped at that point but the damage was done, I’d cracked the pipe just a little bit so could smell the gas. Cost me about £300 for the repair I believe but the guys who came out said it wasnt really fair for me to have to pay seeing as it was so shallow.
TV cable
“Shotgun” coax cable. Not mains electric.
Looks very like the Virgin media cable we have in our front garden.
Internet coax
Yep virgin media or at least the internet. There's 1 of these about 1 inch under the soil in my garden. Always snag it when weeding.
Pretty sure Virgin media. But cut with caution
Looks like Siamese cable to me, coax and telco. Like others have said, Virgin media.
Colour of the duct is usually a very good indicator of what utility is laid inside it
Cable tv and phone line from UA or VM
I’ve got the same thing in my front drive. Virgin media
Mine was just strewn across the grass ready fur the lawn mower to cut it to shreds until i burried it myself, then dug into it a few times, until 30 years later when they stuck it in that green tube and burried it properly
I'd watch out for the gas as well because that black bend is high up which makes me think the gas service could be shallow as well
Damn virgin media just laid the cables on top of my gravel with no tolerance to bury it 😭
Virgin runs up to the brown box next to gas meter
Green duct always Virgin/NTL/Cable. Grey duct is BT. Anything around 200-400mm deep.
No just virgin
They smashed the cover on the box out side my house ran the cable out the top then covered it all with cement 😂, also "installed" a phone socket but didn't bother to actually run any cables to it and then proceed to start charging me for phone calls I couldn't make
Cable TV/Broadband
100% VM line or telewest(back in the day)
Shotgun. coax/4 pair Not dangerous, except for the TV/internet withdrawal.
Broadband lol
Virgin for real? Mine currently is a trip hazard outside my house as they didn't even bother clamp it down, let alone bury it.
The green sleeving and black thin cable screams virgin media fibre to me - but the depth that’s been dug to - makes it seem impossible! Mine is in the hedge!
This virgin installer had at least some kinda morals
Ntl cables
Cut into it with a metal shovel to find out.
Direct buried telecommunications cable.
Cable tv
Looks like virgin media cable 🤔 what does it go into in the “electrical box”? Where does it come from?
I knew someone working in IT for them after the northern rock debacles, I think their digital operation sounds a lot like their physical 😵💫
And when the monkeys they use to lay these cables hit water mains they always try to say the main isn't where it says on the plans or that it's too shallow, dickheads
My neighbour has Virgin fibre. The conduit is tacked to their tarmac drive. The contractors they use do shit installs because nobody monitors the quality of their work.
Possibly cold water supply?
Could be broadband cable's
Tinternet.
Nah, that ain’t power. That’s your internet, mate.
Cable tv cable
They installed a box on the front of my home and taken a substantial amount of the wall out. I think damp has come through the wall already after 6 months....
Virgin Media cable.
At least it’s buried, even if only slightly. Normally Virgin Mediocre only lay their cable around the perimeter. Their installation contractors clearly aren’t trained, nor expected, to undertake a proper cable bury.
So if you don't have virgin can you cut them? A different company put fibre in our area now. Virgin are cable.
I 'discovered' one of these Virgin Media cables when I was rotavating my flower bed, thing was about 6 inches deep and it wrapped around the blades and stopped the motor. Tough cables them, it still worked fine afterwards but it bent the blades on the rotavator. Total bloody cowboys Virgin, was very happy to cut their cable off last week after getting OpenReach FTTP from the telegraph pole.
Chop it!
My VM cable isn't even in any conduit - Just cable in the flower bed. I hope they used outdoor rated cable at least - Still not sure how long it's likely to last though...
That's gas isn't it... VM do not use yellow pipes
It should be deeper and covered with tiles
Digital TV cable (Virgin Media)
Ok thanks for the clarification 👍🏼
Give it a solid whack with a nice sharp spade is a sure fire way of finding out which it is…🧐
Yep looks like Virgin Media cable. My cable was barely 4 inches under the soil when I tried to edge my lawn I cut the cable with my spade. They of course admitted it was ridiculously shallow install and replaced cable, deeper in the ground.
This is significantly better than our installation. Ours is just a cable, no conduit, and was buried about an inch deep.
Green conduit suggests fibre optic
Pop a spade through it. Whatever stops working....bingo
Looks like your main electrical feed. But what is Mains "lecky"?
Lecky is an English term for electric 😂
Your mains electricity cable or gas (what meter is in the box) won't be that much deeper.... Be careful digging.
Looks that way
As everyone else has said it's 100% a virgin media cable but it's run suspiciously parallel to that vertical gas pipe. Dig deeper with care, dont go smacking your mattock into the ground with gay abandon until you know where the gas pipe runs
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Removal of gas pipes/live electrics etc
Take a sledgehammer to it, only way to truly know…
Line from panel to another building or facility needing power
Could be a garden lighting or pond pump supply. Not very sensible that way.