Information received

Since the middle of April, maybe two months ago, I have been wondering about the cable recovered and noticed at reference 1.

The view of an Openreach engineer from Tooting some weeks ago was that it was a two part cable. The big part carried the weight from pole to pole, while the small part carried the signal. Not convinced, but that was the best that we could do at that time.

While the more convincing view of an Openview engineer (retired) from Ewell today was also that it was two part cable, known in the trade as a figure of eight cable. But the sort of thing that people like Virgin used to connect your house to their green box down the road. The shielded, insulated, copper plated steel wire in the big part carried your internet signal while the twisted pair in the small part carried your telephone signal. Steel for strength, as you could not rely on copper not to break when bent too many times,

While BT, with their investment in twisted pairs, were content to use their twisted pair to carry both signals from their green box to your house - with signal technology having moved on so far that they can pump their 20Mb/s - or whatever - down said twisted pair, and split them into internet and telephone on arrival. However, the BT site is oddly coy about their data rates, beyond saying that theirs are better than anyone else's - while reference 2 claims that in my area they do 20MB/s, while Virgin do 50Mb/s. A bit of a mystery, but for the sort of stuff that I do, 20Mb/s is more than enough: I can download more pdf in a second than I can read in a week. What on earth are all these other people up to?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/useful-cable.html.

Reference 2: https://www.uswitch.com/broadband/speedtest/streetstats/.