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?

@Stringervest I would be tempted to cut the cable and remove it and when asked say you cannot discuss who did it due to data protection.

I agree with Little

Dig up your expensive drive, for a non-essential service that isn't even for you? Fuck that

Stringervest I'd be taking a set of cable cutters to that and denying all knowledge should anyone ask...

I'd love to cut those cables! But it would leave my neighbours without internet and I don't want to do that to them. I wish I'd never agreed to this - there was an alternative solution if I'd said no which would have involved my neighbours having to wait a short while. Now it's too late.

That's not even the full story - the full story is longer, and worse. I repeat: don't do it OP.

I agree with others, no way for all the mentioned reasons. Also, would it potentially have a negative effect on your property price? You would have to declare it to potential new owners for access / maintenance / update.

String your posts have me

And

I am a VM customer, and my cable lies across the top of our gravel drive - it might have been under the gravel at some point but hasn't been since last time they fiddled with it. Could they not - if absolutely necessary - trunk the cables above ground?

The industry term for this is wayleave. Here is the link for Virgin's wayleave info - including the phone number of the team. Don't bother with the standard call centre number, they can't help you.

Unfortunately Wayleave is part of life, if it wasn't Virgin then it will be BT Openreach trying to dig these cables. Because it is so complex, they NEVER approach a homeowner unless there is a specific order for broadband in place. This means at least 1 of OP's neighbours has innocently placed an order without knowing what the implications will be.

www.virginmedia.com/lightning/network-expansion/wayleave

Also agree with Little - there's nothing in this for you! And Somerville in that your neighbours probably know nothing of all this, so don't raise it!

If it makes you feel better, you could resolve not to get a Virgin Media subscription yourself, and go with a different provider. Then you're not denying anyone anything you have yourself.

Despite 'justaboy's' ravings about how amazing Virgin Media are, (and how he is educating us thick mumsnetters on all these 'facts' he has,) Virgin Media are wank.

I had them up to about 2-3 years ago, for about 8 years, in a big town I used to live in (before I moved out into a semi rural area and moved to another provider.)

Even though Virgin Media were supposedly faster and a speed test would 'prove' that; they would often 'throttle' your internet, making your speed much slower than they claimed.

In addition, they had lots of issues and problems, and the internet AND TV would go off for 3-4 days at a time every other month for fuck-all. And you had to beg for any kind of refund, and they were the shittiest customer service I have ever had.

My friend who had plusnet (which was allegedly five times slower than my Virgin media,) downloaded and uploaded things waaaaay quicker than me, she had NO problems, and she never had her internet off for 3 or 4 days at a time.

Many years ago when they first came to our county (early 21st century,) Virgin Media were good, but it didn't take them long to become crap. Wouldn't touch them with a barge pole now, even if they DID come out to my semi rural area (which they won't because there's nothing in it for them due to the low population in my rural market town!)

It's not just me either, I know a number of people who have Virgin and say they are shit. And a few others who left them and never looked back.

The OP needs to say NO to them, as she will have nothing but trouble. They are crap when you're a customer of theirs, do you think they'll give a shit about you if you are not?! I also agree with the poster above who said it could affect the value of your house too.

Check your deeds for their right to service media. If it is silent, say no. I'm a surveyor and you are opening a whole barrel of shit having 3rd party service media on your property - it is not worth the capital compensation they will offer.

Virgin have powers under the Telecoms Code. You won't be able to stop them having access to your drive but you can make it difficult for them. If they really want to put a cable there they would have to seek a Court Order.

Virgin Media are wank.

I've never had a problem with them. A lot' depends on your area I think.

VM have just dug up our village. Despite the crews being polite and helpful, it looks a state and as others have said it's just not a necessary service.
If one of your neighbours needs super fast broadband for work etc then they would have or should have considered that before buying their property.

Definitely don't allow it. It will cause you big disruption, potentially ongoing access issues and leave a bloody mess

xt

Thank you all for your feedback and experiences.

It's so helpful.

Bedtime now but discuss next steps with DH.

I'm in London and have VM. customer service and broadband speed are abysmal.

It sounds like you're leaning towards saying no, OP, but if you're approached by your neighbours / do decide to discuss it with Virgin, suggest you say you've spent £10k having the drive laid so you'd only be able to agree if Virgin cover the cost of having the original builders redo the work afterwards. And of course they'd need to fork out £10k for redoing the drive every time they need to do maintenance work on the cables.

user1493759849

The days of throttling have changed greatly you have to be in the usage area of a data centre now to be anywhere near throttled and that's on the upstream side, not the more important downstream. You sometimes have to be careful before you write off any service. A friend of mine they had very poor service from Zen Internet one of the most highly rated providers. They changed to BT and had a very similar problem. The cause was that their wi-fi points were each the other side of a party wall and were both of the same default channel! With the difficult to obtain permission of the neighbor one was changed to channel 1 and the other to 11 all worked much much better better than before. Sorry to sound patronizing but this is a problem and a lot of people have and blame their supplier.

wi-fi has very few channels and there are interference problems that limit speed and performance likewise those plug top adapters and the like. Most people leave their boxes set on the default channel.

They dug up our street many years ago now and all manner of horrible things were alleged to have happened but now you wouldn't know anything was there.

And the very few times its fallen over is been put right very quickly and in the two instances it was our mate Padraig being a shade careless with his digger!

Do you want be bored to death of a story where BT came to install a broadband feed and it took them no less than 9 visits to get it working as it should?. Perhaps not!

SoupDragon You do have a point there. Ordinarily broadband uses the phone wires that your telephone carries speech signals on. The performance is limited by how far away from the exchange you are on, it falls off with distance. That's normally called ADSL.

Fibre to the cabinet VDSL the most common offering now is supplied to a local roadside cabinet by Fibre which carries huge amounts of data but then is taken to your home by the very same copper, sometimes aluminum cables much worse, and the losses due to distance are much greater. Fine if the cabinet is next to your home not so fine if its any distance.

On the VM network that uses a combination of Fibre and co-axial cables which doesn't suffer anywhere near as much. However if VM's own infrastructure isn't available then they use BT wholesale to carry and in effect become as good or bad as most any other provider.

I think they have stopped doing that now or as much as they used to i can ask someone who would know but that does explain the differing performance of their own network and that via the BT net.

You can download your deeds from the land registry website for a small fee - about £6.

Don't touch VM with a barge pole!! Really bad experience with them here.

We have a green cable box attached to the side of our house. Openreach and BT use it on a regular basis making access a nightmare however when Virgin use it they cause incredible discruption. For some reason their "engineers" park diagonally across access points to our house, the dig up the previous tarmacing without telling us, have cut off services. Best yet was when they left the box open and the cable was stolen and we were blamed (it got pretty serious at one point).

I agree with the majority to say no. I can't see any benefits in it for you, only negatives.

If you say yes it could have ramifications when you try to sell your house. If I was a buyer there is no way on earth I'd buy a house where a company thought they could have/need access to my property should they need to dig up or maintain cables via my property.

It still doesn't solve a dilemma - which is do I piss the neighbours off or not!

Reverse this a bit - if anything goes wrong and the neighbour needs/wants works done are they going to be worried about pissing you off to get it done? Probably not. They're only going to be interested in what's best for them. If my neighbour is going to be pissed off with me, I'd rather it was with my property left intact, thanks very much. If something goes wrong you'll have both a messed up yard and a cranky neighbour. It's not worth the aggro. I'm sure Virgin have other options for laying this cable; they're just being lazy in trying it via this method first.

Don't do it. I doubt your neighbours even want it.
Virgin are cheeky twats. They bombarded me with junk post, I have another provider and am quite happy with it, and capable of contacting other companies if I wasn't. I had to tweet them to get them to stop.