I'm not sure this is the right place to ask but I thought I'd try here since it is BT related.

I recently bought a new house and am doing some decorating. It's a reasonably old place and seems to have an old BT Master Socket. Alongside the master socket are two other rather unsightly boxes mounted on the wall - one is a single (electrical socket) sized box which has a blanking plate on it and the other is a larger box with two aerial connections on the bottom which are labelled 'FM' and 'TV'. There is a cable connecting the two boxes and they both have what I think is the old BT logo on them (this one.)

The BT master socket will obviously need to stay but does anyone know what these other two boxes are? I would love to get rid of them if they aren't needed but I don't know if I can. I originally thought they were just a connection for an old aerial (there is now a totally seperate aerial) but I'm confused by the fact that there are BT logos on them. Both boxes also have security screws on them making me think that they aren't supposed to be messed with. I haven't yet got round to looking to appropriate screwdriver heads for the screws (they are sort of like torx but a bit different.)

Any clues on what these boxes are and what they are needed for would be much appreciated.

The box with the "FM" and "TV" outputs is a virgin media cable point.

The "FM" connection carries FM radio signals for connection to a hifi or other fm receiver. The "TV" connection is used by virgin media TV set top boxes and broadband modems.

-Chris

Yes it would make sense for them to be for cable as the house probably was serviced by Atlantic Telecom when they were on the go. The house isn't in a Virgin Media area so the boxes are presumably redundant now since Atlantic Telecom went bust quite a while ago (the boxes do look pretty old.)

My only concern is the fact that the boxes seem to be BT branded. If they were for Atlantic Telecom then why are they branded as BT?
More to the point, are they in anyway linked with the phone line or is it safe to remove them?

Thanks

BT's logo is 'BT', not 'T'

Their old logo was.

If I recall correctly, BT did run a small cable infrastructure suppling analogue channels but this was bought by NTL. Could be that it is cabled up but has since been turned off.

I think that was westminster cable, so i guess if you are in westminster, this would be possible.

It will be for cable tv & radio.

A similar socket is installed in houses in Milton Keynes, and it is still fitted by BT, although billed by VM.

Try plugging a TV or radio into it and see if it works, mine runs a UHF TV feed getting 7 channels in the clear and some scrambled (not sure how many) plus a load of FM radio channels including CRMK. Even new houses are still fitted with the sockets, and it works, and never billed as VM's billing system seems to struggle with the analoge side as they say they are not fitting cable TV to new estates anymore.

BT also had a cable network in Coventry.

..............And in Milton Keynes