Forgive my ignorance

[Ceolmar]

I am doing some major house renovation soon and want to get my head around the cable tv/broadband setup I have. Forgive me if this has been discussed elsewhere.

On the outside of my house there is a brown plastic box with the telewest logo on it. One larger cable goes into the bottom of this box and two thin cables come out. One of these cables goes to my main telewest phone point while the other appears to go to a phone point for the TV.

I have a PC upstairs with a cable modem which has what looks like a coax cable going into it from the loft. Behind my TV I have a wedge shaped white telewest box on the wall with two tv aerial type connectors on it - one is a screw thread,the other has a sort of pointy thing on it (forgive my ignorance!).

I want to minimise the cabling in the house but I need to understand the logic of the system. Is the brown external box the main entry point for the cable? Should there be a coax type cable coming out of it for the PC/TV signal? Is this a CT100 satellite cable? Could I use the wedge shaped box to connect to my cable modem and remove the wasted cable in the loft?

Any help gratefully appreciated

[Maggy J]

I can't help you but I can this thread.

[Paul]

Originally Posted by Ceolmar

I am doing some major house renovation soon and want to get my head around the cable tv/broadband setup I have. Forgive me if this has been discussed elsewhere.

On the outside of my house there is a brown plastic box with the telewest logo on it. One larger cable goes into the bottom of this box and two thin cables come out. One of these cables goes to my main telewest phone point while the other appears to go to a phone point for the TV.

I have a PC upstairs with a cable modem which has what looks like a coax cable going into it from the loft. Behind my TV I have a wedge shaped white telewest box on the wall with two tv aerial type connectors on it - one is a screw thread,the other has a sort of pointy thing on it (forgive my ignorance!).

I want to minimise the cabling in the house but I need to understand the logic of the system. Is the brown external box the main entry point for the cable? Should there be a coax type cable coming out of it for the PC/TV signal? Is this a CT100 satellite cable? Could I use the wedge shaped box to connect to my cable modem and remove the wasted cable in the loft?

Any help gratefully appreciated

If the cable to the PC is going through your loft it must be connecting to one of your external wall boxes somewhere but I would hazzard a guess that unless you want to recable the house or pay TW to do it you won't be able to remove any of the cables without losing something. The feed to the box behind your telly may only be carrying the digital tv signal, I'm not sure if the Broadband gets piggy-backed on the same cable like NTL do in places.
Can you not look in the loft to trace where that cable goes to?

[Rob]

to Cable Forum

the Telewest box on the outside of your house will have a splitter that breaks the large cable into the smaller phone (stranded wire) and TV/broadband coaxial cables. Technically the cables into and out of that external box are still part of Telewest's installation and shouldn't b be messed with by the consumer, right up to the master phone socket, or the termination at the cable modem (CM) / Set Top Box (STB).

By the sounds of things someone has been quite adventurous in the wiring of your house, however, there is no way of knowing how much of that wiring is actually connected.

Cable connections for the STB (TV) will use the threaded connectors, unlike the standard terrestrial aerial that uses a push fit.

Potentially, if the wiring is connected, and the thread for the connector matches, your cable modem can probably use the wedge. Try it and see (if the modem lights are not steady, it's not gettting a signal suggesting wires are not connected somewhere).