Identifying BT and Virgin Media’s Broadband Street Furniture 2020

One of the most common requests we receive comes from UK readers who would like help in identifying the street furniture (cabinets and poles etc.) that has been installed outside of their homes, not least whether or not it relates to broadband connectivity. Hopefully this guide will help to answer such questions.

At present both Openreach (BT) and Virgin Media (Liberty Global) are engaged in a significant expansion and upgrade of their respective broadband networks. On the one hand Virgin Media’s DOCSIS (EuroDOCSIS) based Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) and “full fibre” FTTP network is expanding its reach to around 60% of UK premises (16-17 million total).

On the other hand Openreach continue to deploy a variety of hybrid fibre-based (FTTC etc.) services to near universal levels of coverage, while their latest FTTP based ultrafast broadband technology should reach 15 million UK premises by around 2025. On top of that they also have a few million premises covered by hybrid fibre G.fast.

Suffice to say that some local streets are starting to become cluttered and yet many people will understandably struggle to identify what is actually being installed in their neighbourhood(s). As a result of that we’ve put together a simplified guide to help you identify some or all of the kit being installed.

Take note that a lot of infrastructure can be hidden beneath the ground, which can make pictures somewhat useless. Instead we’ve endeavoured to help identify the bits and bobs that you’re more likely to see with your own eyes, which we’ve roughly ordered by operator and technology type. Over time, and with the help of our readers, we aim to expand this list.

One other point to make is that there’s a growing market for alternative network providers, which sometimes use similar kit and thus a cursory visual inspection isn’t always enough. Likewise a number of areas have also experimented with wrapping cabinets in custom vinyl or painted prints (here and here) and that can make them harder to identify.

Virgin Media’s Street Furniture

Generally the kit you see from Virgin will vary depending upon whether your area is being served by their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) or Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) Cable network, although nearly all of their modern street furniture tends to be coloured in a greyish cream (this helps to keep their hardware cool and to differentiate them from Openreach).

However some of their older street furniture, which was inherited from the NTL and Telewest days, is still coloured green and they can optionally colour new cabinets green.

VMDDx (e.g. VMDD1/HP1 – VMDD3/HP3 or VMDD3i)

These cabinets are for either Virgin’s Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) or FTTP network and come in various different sizes, albeit with broadly the same cosmetic appearance. The cabinets can help to serve as few as 60 homes or as many as 1024 and either contain distribution kit or distribution and nodal kit. DD1 and 2 are larger than DD3.

VMSD1 / VMSD1i

A smaller distribution or amplifier cabinet that is again used for either HFC or FTTP (SD1i). Such cabinets can help to serve as few as 30 homes by themselves or be used to support others in connecting up to a total of 512. One catch here is that Virgin can also use the same chassis to act as a dedicated power cabinet, such as for the next beast.

VMVH1

This is an absolute unit of a nodal cabinet (virtual hub). The large chassis is generally used as part of FTTP based deployments and you’ll normally see one for every 3,000 homes. Cabinets like this tend to be flanked by the smaller cabinet above, which is often acting as a power supply.

Virgin Media EV Car Charging Cabinets

In a few areas Virgin Media have deployed some specially modified cabinets that help to support a new system for charging electric cars (here). We don’t know much about these but at present there are only a very few of them around.

Older Virgin Media / Telewest / NTL Cabinets

Over the years we’ve seen Virgin Media use a variety of different cabinets and that’s particularly true from the old NTL and Telewest days (both were later merged into Virgin Media). You can see a small selection below but we know there are others, including some very sharp solid rectangular ones. Sadly finding good images of the older kit has proven to be rather difficult. The big green cabinets are often confused with Openreach’s similar PCP ones (see page 2).

Wall Mounted Distribution Boxes

If you happen to live inside an apartment block (Multi-Dwelling Unit) then you might sometimes come across one of these. Virgin tends to use several from different companies like OpticReach and Hexatronic. Some of these are used for terminating drop cables in an MDU and others are used as a primary connection point for the entire building.

External Wall  / Termination Boxes (Cable Wall Boxes)

Not strictly street furniture but if you live in a house then you’ll probably find one of these boxes on the outside of it. The larger wall box on the right is used in their FTTP installs and often contains a Radio Frequency over Glass (RFoG) node like the Vector BOOSTRAL 611, which converts the optical fibre signal into a coaxial DOCSIS one for use inside your home (i.e. so they can use the same customer kit regardless of HFC or FTTP).

The smaller junction box on the left is often used for cable management and holding splitters in regular HFC deployments.

We do know of some other Virgin Media street furniture but have so far been unable to find any usable pictures.

Flick over the page to see Openreach’s street furniture.