Denying access to cable for neighbours

[EatsShitAndLeaves]

So I got a letter in the post from Virgin Media who are in our locality.

They want me to give permission to lay cable down my drive to access the houses behind.

I live in an old farmhouse with a big front/back garden- before we moved in after the "field" at the back was sold and 3 houses built on it.

They have access to their property via my drive - but I own the drive.

I've done a very shitty picture to illustrate...R is road, G is garden and D is Drive. My house is the rectangle.

It's not to scale. The drive is very long and we spent a lot of money block paving it when we moved in.

I'm not at all keen on this being ripped up and botched reinstated.

As we are on the Main Street we would get access to Virgin services regardless. Allowing the work gains us nothing - apart from stress and hassle.

However if I deny the work then my neighbours can't take this service.

AIBU to refuse access?

GladAllOver Thanks for your considered reply! Yes i do know all of that the point i was trying to make was why should virgin media who are a telecom's infrastructure provider be treated different to any other services supplier like Leccy, Gas and Water BT etc.

Someone did mention that they don't just supply phone lines but they do! our local council and part of the health services round here do use them there are two bits of VM one domestic and the other Business and industrial.

As said they don't just do TV! What they do do over their own plant and equipment is very good broadband as BeyondThe Page has noted. I do know a few people who would let them do most anything to get on service who at present are on the end of miles of old BT wiring to whom services such as iplayer are a distant dream who still have piss poor broadband barely one megabit on the days when Its actually going!.

Its quite, almost amusing that some have said let them use Sky, well i have a friend up in Gods chosen county of Yorkshire who lives in what would have been a very pretty street location but its festooned with overheard power cables Telephone lines and worst of all sky dishes all at differing heights an locations it looks awful really does.

One other matter is as I see it is competition. Before VM came along you had to sometimes to wait months before good old BT would get their act together and get you a line now where available you can get that from other providers. Here I have a phone line that was once operated by BT that went to whats called VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) runs over Virgin broadband. So instead of 18 odd quid a month and call set up fees and the like its 1.50 a month rental and a penny a minute at the most for calls usual half a pee! I also pay that price to cal the other side of America!

At a firm I've taken over the phone bill has now reduced from around a grand a quarter to just 50 quid a month by the same means.

I'm sure the Op will get this sorted if they VM do their bit it does seem its been over complicated and furthermore I live in an area whats been cabled for many years they have never had to dig the road up for maintenance its all in ducts the idea is you can pull cables through ducts the bit they lay from the road to the house has a life of over a 100 years as is designed for direct burial.

Anyway lets hope they can come to a successful stress free outcome!

@Justaboy am curious as to why someone you know had to obtain permission from a neighbour in order to change the channel on their router?

In other words carte Blanche to do what they like!
This is what would concern me. I'm also sceptical that repairs after the work would endure long term on a block paved surface which had been disturbed.

Some great advice on this thread and by PM it seems. My own comments are that you don't have to be proactive in this matter and if you should decide to give permission, your interests should be represented by legal and surveying professionals of your own choosing, but funded by VM.

If you weren't opposed to it, you could suggest a the cable be laid in a small diameter duct tacked to bottoms of the fence if you have one?

I'm not in the UK but work in land development, generally if there is a RoW, it is likely that the other houses don't have any other road frontage. This means they should have power, telecommunication and sewer easements (which generally coincide with a RoW but not always). It's possible that cable will fall under the fairly broad 'telecommunication' heading (cable isn't really a thing here, it's all digital).

My point, is that you should find the deed and see what it says.

I wouldn't. With the hash they made with my cable over my front lawn I would deinitely not as they will probably end up doing a fair bit of maintenance and inconveniencing you in the future.

*Someone did mention that they don't just supply phone lines but they do! our local council and part of the health services round here do use them there are two bits of VM one domestic and the other Business and industrial.

Posted too soon!
Someone did mention that they don't just supply phone lines but they do! our local council and part of the health services round here do use them there are two bits of VM one domestic and the other Business and industrial.
That won't be a phone line they are providing. A large business will have a digital phone service running over a broadband connection. Known as VOIP.

EnriqueTheRingBearingLizard This was a case of a bit of grief betwixt two neighbors they were both suspicious of each other so that's why permission had to be obtained from one to access their broadband router to change said channels!.

There are 13 of them BUT they do overlap a bit the default ones are 1, 6 and 11 Sometimes 13 is quite useful its a minimum overlap one but few know of its existence.

I swear neighbor one still believed in black magic spells and the like;!

GladAllOver Well most all calls these days are digital signals excepting old POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines there are analogue to the subscribers premises.

And yes VoIP is all digital and that can be carried by copper lines co-axial cable fibre to the user premises even!. On a few formats as well 2 Meg G704, ISDN multi-channel but VoIP is the way its going :)

smurfit Cable is now all digital! Do you mean that Virgin Media aren't over there or someone has an all digital phone TV and broadband system?.

EnriqueTheRingBearingLizard This was a case of a bit of grief betwixt two neighbors they were both suspicious of each other so that's why permission had to be obtained from one to access their broadband router to change said channels!

@Justaboy, my apologies if this seems to be pedandtic, because that isn't my intention at all, I just don't understand.
Do you mean neighbour 1 got permission to access neighbour 2's router to change its channel? as opposed to just showing neighbour 2 how to do it, or, simply changing their own channel?

I'm puzzled

Yes it was quite complicated. But basically there were two people living in a semi detached, neighbour A one house and B in the other. Neighbour B asked for advice as his broadband was very poor the incoming signal connected to the router by a network or CAT 5 cable was very good but if the wi-fi point was used it was very poor so much so that the wi-fi unit was suspected of being at fault.

The wi-fi unit was switched off and it was noted on a wi-fi scanner app on a smartphone that the signal was about as strong as with B's wi-fi switched off.

The wife of B mentioned that Mrs A next door had said one day in passing her husband and children were always complaining that their broadband was poor and didn't work to well.

So I asked them if we could come around to check a few things initially the wife of A was very reluctant to do so in case we'd break it, and at one point she thought that as it was an old house someone had put a "Hex" on it! However modern investigative techniques were involved instead and it was discovered that their wi-fi unit was right next to the other side of the dividing wall and was on channel 6 which is the default channel. So i asked them if we could reset that to channel 1 and then set next door B to channel 11 so there was a wide difference in channels.

Both A and B noted that their broadband signal had improved very much and was much better now that the two wi-fi units were not interfering with each other! I still think that Mrs A thought i possessed some sort of modern day wizard or exorcist type powers!

But now all sorted!

Has the OP decided further as yet?

It's really a red herring as to what company wants to access the property. The bottom line is, someone wants to, and the decision has to be made as to whether to give permission or not. Personally, I wouldn't.

There's no guarantee the property will be put back 100% as it and the OP will be inconvenienced for something that won't even benefit her. Further down the track, if something goes wrong the company will want to come back, and inconvenience OP again, all for something that has nothing to do with her.

Virgin Media are amongst the most unprofessional/idiotic/infuriating companies that I've ever dealt with. This will cause you lots and lots of stress.

Don't even consider it.

We've been with them (aaargh) for 3 years and it's I can't even call them anymore as it is so stressful. DH does it. He never loses his temper. He did when trying to deal with Virgin Media.

They made a hole in our outside wall to instal our cable/wire/whatever and it took months of pleading/arguing and finally exposing them on public media before they fixed it. That was only the beginning.

Don't do it.
I had the electric company doing upgrades to the poles on our street. They asked if they could out put a pole on my drive as where the old pole had been was unstable. They gave me a contract to pay me rent for the inconvenience. Weeks later I called the company to ask where the rent was. The electric company has no record of it. Said it was the contractor. Said they would chase it up. 2 weeks later called them again. Again no idea what i was talking about. Had to send photos of bloody pole to prove where it was! A year later never heard anymore from them. If I had had the guts I would have taken a saw to their bloody pole.
Do not believe a thing virgin tell you. They will not give a damm about your drive once cable is put in.
And they will gave right of access to fix any problems forever which will mean digging up your drive as and when they please. I can't get virgin TiVo here but I survive.

Well EatsShitAndLeaves do let us know the end outcome was. I think a sensible idea may be to tell them that they can do it but your driveway is hallowed ground and for religious reason they ain't gonna touch it;!

If they can get around the end of it under grass or what ever that is, is it the driveway actually connected to the main road it doesn't quite appear like that on the sketch but if that is possible suppose it will be OK.

Well Justaboy, I'm also with VM, in London, and I get nothing like your speeds - today 12.2mbps download and 1.09mbps upload. I really must get round to cancelling the telly bit, as it's complete shit and I never watch it.

And OP, YANBU. Don't let them bugger up your drive for no benefit to you.

Monty if their running that off their own network then theres something very wrong with that. However they do or did rather sub it out to BT and use their network like a lot of other providers do.

Here's a suggestion. Give Zen a call they will tell you what you should be getting and their quite accurate, they are one of the best ISP's around, not the absolute cheapest but on service and support grounds we wouldn't use anyone else!.

www.zen.co.uk/yourhome/

@Justaboy aaaah, not complicated at all then. Adjoining neighbours who don't understand the mysterious workings of routers and t'internet and were concerned any changes would result in a cock up. Easily solved when they let you get on with it

Did you manage to resolve something EatsShitAndLeaves?