Alternative to copper cable

[Riley197]

Hi,

I was wondering if there are alternative drop wire telephone cables available compared to the standard copper wire that BT already uses.

Would it be possible to crimp for example aerial cable to exisiting telephone cable for the connection to run down the aerial cable?

[licquorice]

Why?

Anything external to your property belongs to Openreach and is not to be tampered with.

[iniltous]

As already asked , Why ?, short answer is No, Openreach wouldn’t and you shouldn’t , but why do you think this would be better ( connecting a copper pair to a coax cable for what presumably would be a short run of cable )

OR drop cable is designed to be suspended, a coaxial cable isn’t , so even if there were some electrical attenuation benefit , or shielding property to be had, it couldn’t be suspended between a pole and property.

If , what you are asking is , instead of having a phone cable and aerial cable running down a wall could the phone service be carried alongside the TV signal in the aerial cable, reducing the number of visible cables ?
OR would not sanction any such method, you would be sending 50v DC from the exchange , into the TV aerial socket when it isn’t designed to accept that type of input , potentially damaging the TV.

[Riley197]

What I meant by alternative is for example using virgin media coax copper cable to extend the telephone cable on my house

[iniltous]

Virgin only use coax for the TV part of their service, AFAIK , they use twisted copper pairs ( same as OR ) for the phone side…if you have a coil of VM coax and want to use it for an extension, provided it’s connected to the consumer panel of the OR master socket and not the network, you could try it , if it works ( which it may not ) it’s not likely to be better than standard phone extension cabling .

You shouldn’t be touching the existing OR wiring before the master socket, and certainly shouldn’t be cutting it, and inserting a length of co-ax , to extend it to another location,  if it works at all it would be unreliable and if it failed and OR called out it would certainly be a chargeable repair, theoretically coax has two legs the inner solid core and the outer mesh but not sure how that could be made to connect with a drop cable , best not to do it, or be prepared to pay the cost if you do and it needs a proper fix to restore service , plus if broadband on the line, who knows what affect a lash up like this would have on speed etc.