moving...AARRRGH

[callmeslick]

....well, we finally moved completely into the house here in Delaware. The old house in PA will be sold, sometime. This house is the one I grew up in, and as a kid, I didn't realize how spacious it, and the grounds were. At any rate, I do now, and the wife and I have it set up pretty comfortably. One oddity is the taxes...this house(worth 3 times the one in PA) has lower taxes than the PA house. What is seemingly unfair about that is that Berks County, PA, is a pretty poor region overall, where this neighborhood is one of the 6 most affluent areas in the whole nation.
On to the AARRRGH! part: Do not, I repeat, DO NOT, contract with Comcast if you don't absolutely have to. Over the past two days, the following has transpired:
1. Installer, due to be here on Friday at 3pm, and contracted 5 weeks in advance, shows up a 9:30 pm. This, after 7 calls by me to Comcast, and
exactly ZERO calls from Comcast to inform me of delays.
2. Installer #1 tells me it is too late to do the install. I agree. I have to go up two levels to a manager to get rescheduled for the next morning,
instead of waiting until Wednesday, as they suggest.
3. Installer #2 arrives on time, and then claims that we are to get HD on only one TV, and no wireless router, because that's what he order sheet says.
Another couple calls to customer service convince him otherwise.
4. After all is installed(to be fair, TV picture is great, web speed stellar), I go to call out-of-state pals to let them know new number. I get the message,
"your call cannot be completed due to restrictions in your calling plan". Also, he has installed DVR box in wrong location.
5. I am told that the DVR box cannot be moved, except by another service guy, at my expense. Also, engineers have to look into why I cannot make
out of state calls, and that will take another 2 or 3 days to fix(software on their end, apparently)
AAAARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!! Rant off, but, between me and my lawyer, I'll get money back from these idiots. Otherwise, I will just chill, we'll go and have a nice lunch at the country club with my parents(we now live only 3 miles away from them), and I'll relax and watch some football.

[woodchip]

Ah, the life of the rich and famous

[Krom]

Do not get your phone service from the cable company. Use Vonage, Ooma or any other "over the top" voip provider. They give you a voip box that you can plug into your existing router which you can keep and take with you wherever you go, keeping your same phone number no matter where you are or what ISP you are using. Ooma is especially nice, since its a $200 initial investment for the box, but after that your phone bill is $4/mo (unless you sign up for some premium services, but they are still a lot cheaper than the $30-40 base rate for a dial tone that the cable co charges, not to mention the modem rental they force down your throat).

Also you have just gotten burned by the fact that the cable company owns the cable lines (and thus has a cable monopoly in your area) and has no economic incentive to actually serve their customers well. Perhaps this would be a good time to suggest to your politician friends that all the telecoms should be forced into line sharing, or actually they should be outright decoupled from owning the network at all, much like how it is done in other countries that today have dramatically superior communications infrastructure and service than we do.

But what do I know, the telecoms all spend millions of dollars saying that the sector is filled with healthy competition since there are so many providers. Who am I to disagree by saying "a dozen regional monopolies doesn't equal healthy competition" without amplifying it with millions of dollars of lobbying muscle...

[callmeslick]

valid points all, Krom. As for Woody? Ummm, well it was a nice try, I suppose.

[woodchip]

Well I have Charter and I never had any of Slicks horror stories. Installers been on time, bundled phone lets me call anywhere in US and only complaint I have is periodically some channels have problems viewing but only rarely.

[flip]

Charter's been pretty solid here too, except for last week when some numbnut thought it a good idea to shoot the fiber optic cable in half with a shotgun, lol. Cable and internet was done for around 16-18 hours I guess. Good idea on the phone though Krom, didn't know that.

EDIT: Guess I should have said, was pretty solid, because the stalling is starting to piss me off.

[Tunnelcat]

Comcast sucks. That's why I don't have their phone service and I'm sorely temped to dump their cable service. It's also one of those companies I do business with that I never allowed autopay billing to be set up.

[flip]

I'll tell you one thing about Charter that pisses me off. I tried them initially with no contract, about a year and half I guess and the connect was solid. Well, they tried to bump up the promotional price and after haggling for about 20 minutes, I got about 20 more off for a one year contract instead of 2. Well, about 3 months into it I started getting calls to "upgrade" my line and the speed I had was already good enough for all of us. Ever since then, my connect stalls intermittently =/, pfft. I'll be shopping around I guess after this next few months are up, because I got no respect for that crap.

[roid]

TEE.....VEE?

i wish i'd taken your advice about Voip earlier Krom. My current ISP (and monthly-fee-free Voip provider ) is trying to get outof the Voip business, but is contractually obliged to continue giving me service until I SAY otherwise. The loophole is that they will no-longer let me upgrade my internet service without taking it as an excuse to finally cut off my precious Voip. So i'm stuck with 20(peak)+20(offpeak) GB/month.
So yeah, gonna have to grab a 3rd party voip one of these days.
(strange you mention a seperate voip box though - my router has voip inbuilt, isn't that normal? Or is ADSL rarer than i thought thesedays or something? MMMMM COPPER)

Also interesting fact: a few weeks ago a port-scanning script kiddie rudely clued me into the fact that you can actually make my telephone ring by sending a request to my IP address directly! All you need to know is my IP address (and relevant port and protocol trick) and BRRRIIINNNNGGG. Don't even need to know my phone number. :I
I mean, i can play with the router settings to apparently block all requessts other than from my Voip provider's IP range, but still... wow, a disturbing erosion of my illusion of internet anonymity. Dial my IP address and yell at me

[snoopy]

I currently don't have anything other than verizon DSL because of my hate for Comcast.

There are two things in particular that I'm not happy about:

1. They won't me watch my Flyers for anything less than about $50/mo. At that rate... I'll spend the $600 on tickets and listen to the games. (I'm looking forward to the day of service d-jour - when I can sign up for Flyers + a couple other channels and not bother paying for the stuff that I don't want.)
2. They encrypt basically all of their channels, locking my home DVR out of them - though I think certain devices + a decoder card (rented from them, of course) will take care of that.


These days I'm starting to question my libertarian beliefs... because monopolies sure can get nasty....

[Foil]

1. They won't me watch my Flyers for anything less than about $50/mo. At that rate... I'll spend the $600 on tickets and listen to the games. (I'm looking forward to the day of service d-jour - when I can sign up for Flyers + a couple other channels and not bother paying for the stuff that I don't want.)

Similar for NFL (they don't offer the "Sunday Ticket" which would allow me to get all my team's games), though they do offer the NFL RedZone channel (which I really enjoy).

2. They encrypt basically all of their channels, locking my home DVR out of them - though I think certain devices + a decoder card (rented from them, of course) will take care of that.

Correct, you'll want a CableCard to get all your channels (I do, and it works incredibly well!). But you're wrong about the rental; there's no cost involved. In fact, they give you a hefty discount for using a CableCard instead of renting a cable box and/or dvr! Saves me close to $15/month.

-----

Personally, I like Comcast over the local DSL provider (CenturyLink). For all their quirks with service and techs, the data delivery is spectacular. The speeds are blazing fast (especially in low-traffic times, when they'll bump up your bandwidth a bit), and the only downtime in the six years or so I've had them was when somebody physically cut a line.

[Top Gun]

My family's been pretty happy with Verizon FiOS thus far, though we used to be on Comcast's regular cable service and Internet. Comcast basically had a complete monopoly around here until Verizon started laying down fiber-optic.

[Tunnelcat]

Correct, you'll want a CableCard to get all your channels (I do, and it works incredibly well!). But you're wrong about the rental; there's no cost involved. In fact, they give you a hefty discount for using a CableCard instead of renting a cable box and/or dvr! Saves me close to $15/month.

Not so anymore. Comcast is now charging the same rate for a CableCARD that they charge for a cable box. These bastards are even charging a $2 a month fee for each lousy analog DTA box you have for any older TV sets. Cheap pikers. And the CableCARD doesn't allow 2-way communication for all cable features, like On Demand. It's almost as if the cable companies don't want people to get CableCARDs...................... They're pushing for the DCAS, Downloadable Conditional Access System, which the FCC hasn't approved of yet.

http://forums.comcast.com/t5/Billing/Ca ... -p/1228625

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CableCARD

-----

Personally, I like Comcast over the local DSL provider (CenturyLink). For all their quirks with service and techs, the data delivery is spectacular. The speeds are blazing fast (especially in low-traffic times, when they'll bump up your bandwidth a bit), and the only downtime in the six years or so I've had them was when somebody physically cut a line.

Not in my neck of the woods. Every home up here is on Comcast, with the bundled phone and extras. When everybody uses the system, which they like to do most of the time, it bogs down because of the ancient system architecture. It takes a full 24 hours just for the cable DVR to download the entire 2 week guide, so if there's a power outage, or reset (which I swear needs to be done one a week), you can't look ahead to the next week until the next day.

[Foil]

Comcast is now charging the same rate for a CableCARD that they charge for a cable box.

Not true, tc!

P.S. If that's what they're charging you, take it up with their billing department.

The first CableCARD in a retail device (e.g., TiVo devices or CableCARD equipped televisions) is free to Comcast customers.

If you subscribe to XFINITY® or Comcast TV service and you own a CableCARD device or a video converter which qualifies for use on a Comcast cable system, you may be eligible for a Customer Owned Equipment credit.

The first saves me about $12-15/month in cable box / HD-dvr rental costs. The second is a $2.50/month credit, which I've been getting for over a year now.

[Tunnelcat]

It seems you're right. The first card is free, but there is a charge if you want more than one, even on the same unit (TiVo). But it still doesn't allow a cable customer to use On Demand, Pay per View and Comcast's interactive guide. You're stuck with the CableCARD manufacturer's guide and whether they see fit to keep it current.

[Foil]

The first card is free, but there is a charge if you want more than one, even on the same unit (TiVo).

No, not quite. They will give you free CableCards for as many CableCard devices as you have. They only charge the $1.50 fee if you want more than one in a single device. I have two in my HTPC for multi-channel simultaneous DVR-ing, but the $1.50 is still 10x better than the $15 rental fee for an HD-dvr box.

You're stuck with the CableCARD manufacturer's guide and whether they see fit to keep it current.

No, that's not true, either.

The listings come through Comcast, same as if you were renting one of their boxes. (In my experience, the listings are updated frequently, and I always have at least two weeks' worth of upcoming listings.) And the interface is up to the device; for example, I use WMC, which has a really smooth feature-rich interface, better than any cable box or TiVO I've ever used.

[roid]

It takes a full 24 hours just for the cable DVR to download the entire 2 week guide, so if there's a power outage, or reset (which I swear needs to be done one a week), you can't look ahead to the next week until the next day.

Your DVR just might be set to do an slow idle background scan through all of the channels over each 24hr period.
If you watch one channel live for a while, does the EPG information for that channel tend to update much faster while you're watching the channel? Check it. It's what happens on my DTV, so if i want to force an EPG refresh for all channels i'll slowly MANUALLY surf through all the channels - watching each channel for about a minute or so.

[Capm]

Wow, its amazing how misguided some of you are when it comes to the cable industry. I'll post on this later, as it will take a bit to write up.

[snoopy]

Wow, its amazing how misguided some of you are when it comes to the cable industry. I'll post on this later, as it will take a bit to write up.

I'm curious what you have to say about it....

I imagine my take on it is part of your dismay.

[Tunnelcat]

No, not quite. They will give you free CableCards for as many CableCard devices as you have. They only charge the $1.50 fee if you want more than one in a single device. I have two in my HTPC for multi-channel simultaneous DVR-ing, but the $1.50 is still 10x better than the $15 rental fee for an HD-dvr box.

Well, there is still some confusion. I agree that the first CableCARD is free in a single device and that the second one garners a higher charge of $1.50 "in the same device". But there seems to be some confusion if you have multiple devices in your home that need a CableCARD. Some have indicated that the charge for those is the same as the additional outlet fee, which is higher.

How much will I be charged to use a CableCARD?

The first CableCARD in a retail device (e.g., TiVo devices or CableCARD equipped televisions) is free to Comcast customers. If a second CableCARD is needed for the same device (i.e., TiVo Series 3 boxes), the cost is $1.50 per month for the additional card. Again, this ONLY applies to a second CableCARD in the same device.

The listings come through Comcast, same as if you were renting one of their boxes. (In my experience, the listings are updated frequently, and I always have at least two weeks' worth of upcoming listings.) And the interface is up to the device; for example, I use WMC, which has a really smooth feature-rich interface, better than any cable box or TiVO I've ever used.

Not according to Comcast. It's a different guide put out by the manufacturer of the card. Your card manufacturer must have a well managed guide setup Foil.

Why does my on-screen guide look different from the Digital Cable set-top box guide?

CableCARD compatible retail devices often use an on-screen guide specific to the manufacturer, which is different from the guide provided by Comcast. As a result, the program guide may not always match Comcast's On-Screen Program Guide. For more information on your on-screen guide functionality and features, please consult your owner's manual.

Your DVR just might be set to do an slow idle background scan through all of the channels over each 24hr period.
If you watch one channel live for a while, does the EPG information for that channel tend to update much faster while you're watching the channel? Check it. It's what happens on my DTV, so if i want to force an EPG refresh for all channels i'll slowly MANUALLY surf through all the channels - watching each channel for about a minute or so.

I've never noticed that. Next time I could try that for my favorites channels and see what happens after the next reset. I've also found that with this particular Comcast DVR, if it doesn't get a hard reboot once a month, unplug it altogether, it's starts ignoring button presses and then it locks up and becomes unresponsive. The 2 different cable boxes I've used have exhibited this behavior. Do they have a memory management problem?

Another gripe I have is that if Comcast resets the box during the night and if I don't notice it for a whole day, (I'm not going to babysit their equipment) the stupid thing gets itself in a state that doesn't allow it to start downloading ANY guide information until it's turned on and off at least once. A whole day wasted it could have been downloading the damned guide. Like I said, Comcast has high speed internet, so why does their old tech guide take longer than dial up speeds to download?

[Foil]

The listings come through Comcast...

Not according to Comcast. It's a different guide put out by the manufacturer of the card.

Yes, and sorry, I should clarify: The channel-availability is done through the card (authorization for my channels is controlled by Comcast, same as for their set-top boxes), my listings are done through WMC.

[Tunnelcat]

By WMC, are you referring to Windows Media Center? Is that picking up the actual Comcast guide, or the CableCARD manufacturers guide? It doesn't sound like third party CableCARDs use Comcast's own on screen guide according to Comcast. I am interested in maybe getting a CableCARD ready TV someday if they don't screw it up with their infighting over who gets control of what.

[Foil]

By WMC, are you referring to Windows Media Center?

Yes. It's a great interface, particularly for browsing/managing recordings/schedules, and customizing things to your liking. The listings have tons of browsable info (thumbnails for the recordings, public-domain movie/show reviews, cast/crew links, show info, etc.). The one thing it doesn't do natively is auto-commercial-skipping, but it can be set up if needed.

Is that picking up the actual Comcast guide, or the CableCARD manufacturers guide?

The CableCard manufacturer isn't involved in the listings/interface; it's up to the device (CableCard TV, TiVO, HTPC, etc.).

For WMC, MS has their own listings-compilation service, and it's kept pretty darn accurate in my experience. As far as I can tell, they get their data directly from Comcast, because I just selected the "Comcast - Denver suburbs - CableCard" listing when I set it up.

[Tunnelcat]

Hmmmm, does the PC's TV tuner need a special slot for the CableCARD?

[Krom]

To find out if it does: Read the manual.

[Capm]

I'll start by saying that regarding the original post, that experience can often be an unfortunate fact of life when dealing with a large operator who is contracting out installs. You can sum that up to "Good help is hard to find" - it doesn't really mean that they don't have a good product, but sometimes that just happens when people drop the ball in a large operation. I've seen this happen a lot. Its not representative of the majority, or they wouldn't have many customers.


Moving on..

from Krom -

Do not get your phone service from the cable company. Use Vonage, Ooma or any other "over the top" voip provider. They give you a voip box that you can plug into your existing router which you can keep and take with you wherever you go, keeping your same phone number no matter where you are or what ISP you are using. Ooma is especially nice, since its a $200 initial investment for the box, but after that your phone bill is $4/mo (unless you sign up for some premium services, but they are still a lot cheaper than the $30-40 base rate for a dial tone that the cable co charges, not to mention the modem rental they force down your throat).

This varies from provider to provider, depending on their setup - but the difference between your "vonages" and your local provider is just that. Your local provider is LOCAL. You ain't going to get Vonage to come out to your house and fix your phone when it messes up. Also, who knows where that call server is located. Most operations doing cable-phone have their own local switch, which greatly improves call quality and reliability. There is a world of difference between the two services that I'm not going to get into, but I'll sum it up by, you get what you pay for usually. Not that vonage doesn't work, because it does, but it has its limitations.

Also you have just gotten burned by the fact that the cable company owns the cable lines (and thus has a cable monopoly in your area) and has no economic incentive to actually serve their customers well. Perhaps this would be a good time to suggest to your politician friends that all the telecoms should be forced into line sharing, or actually they should be outright decoupled from owning the network at all, much like how it is done in other countries that today have dramatically superior communications infrastructure and service than we do.

This is quite possibly the single worst possible thing that could happen. It would be a catastrophe. Let me put it to you this way. You go out and buy a 200,000 dollar race car, and decide that you're going to give rides in it for 10 bux. But then the government steps in and tells you that you have to let Redneck Larry use your car so that HE can sell rides. So now, instead of getting $10 from a ride, you only get $6, and Redneck Larry scratches the paint and dents the bumper. But he doesn't have to pay to repair it, because its YOUR car.
And, in addition to that, the government regulates how often you can drive and where, and you have to submit form after form and pay fees to a government agency who keeps track of it, and if you fall out of compliance, you get fined.

Now, tell me what thats going to do to your ride service? Is that going to make it better?

Did you know that a regulated phone company, in deploying FTTH, under certain circumstances, if their grant says to deploy in whatever "city" they cannot build out to serve a customer who is outside that city boundry? Even if it is LITERALLY right across the street. Your neighbor could have gigabit ethernet to his house, and you could get nothing. Not a problem for an unregulated cable company.

I'm also quite certain that this kind of legislation would put every remaining small operator out of business. All Cable providers with less than... 50,000 subs... they'd probably go under within 5 years. Larger ops would see a reduction in quality of service, because you'd suddenly have god knows who, trained to do who knows what, out there messing with your cable plant every day, cause all kinds of problems, and then you'd be buried under regulated paperwork before you could do anything about anything.

It'd be a total complete effing nightmare.

Competition? How about Dish and DirectTV, and their deals with ILEC's like Century Link and whatnot, to provide a triple play, is that not competition?


Moving on....

From Flip

Ever since then, my connect stalls intermittently =/, pfft.

Did you call in a service call? Lots of things can cause that. Ingress, intermittant noise...squirrel chewed drop, water corrosion... another wireless router walking on your same channel nearby. Oh no, the service just sucks, thats just how it is. I hate that crap.


moving on...


roid

Also interesting fact: a few weeks ago a port-scanning script kiddie rudely clued me into the fact that you can actually make my telephone ring by sending a request to my IP address directly! All you need to know is my IP address (and relevant port and protocol trick) and BRRRIIINNNNGGG. Don't even need to know my phone number. :I
I mean, i can play with the router settings to apparently block all requessts other than from my Voip provider's IP range, but still... wow, a disturbing erosion of my illusion of internet anonymity. Dial my IP address and yell at me

You can do that with vonage and them too because they're the same thing. Get the EMTA from them, they're more secure, and as I noted, the call quality is likely better also.


moving on....
snoopy and the few following..

2. They encrypt basically all of their channels, locking my home DVR out of them - though I think certain devices + a decoder card (rented from them, of course) will take care of that.

This: plus a cable card, will fix that.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6815706001



Plus the encryption is there to prevent theft of service.


Any fees you get from the use of additional boxes or cable cards in your house, are not fees for the boxes themselves, but they're actually covering the "transport" costs associated with having that decoder active in their system (they get charged for each device they turn on through the conditional access service provider) Actual service fees are associated with either a package or the first device.





I've run out of time to further clarify (who knew wifes would be so high maintnence... and why didn't they warn us!!)

[Krom]

LOL satellite internet competitive with terrestrial wired... Not in this universe.

Line sharing doesn't fix everything with broadband, but its a hell of a lot better than allowing private industry to monopolize the infrastructure.

[Capm]

DirectTV bundles with Century Links DSL and Phone. Neither Dish or Direct offer satellite internet.

Krom, if you believe that, you're a fool. You have no idea just how bad it would be. It would make things much worse, not better.

Monopolize.. No.. Anyone can get a franchise and go out and build their own cable system over top of another. There are lots of big cities where that happens. Its called overbuilding. It works in large metro operations, but in a small town, there just aren't enough people to go round, you'd never make any money with two operators in play.

[snoopy]

My problem with the cable card/DRM issue:

The whole premise of the system precludes open source software from being supported. If the content is flagged "free to copy" then I'm fine... if it's flagged "copy once" or "do not copy" then open source solutions (such as xbmc) are currently locked out - completely - because by their open-source nature they can't be guaranteed to comply with the flag for all deployments.

(I hear rumors about xbmc working on this.... maybe some sort of a close source plugin or the like....)

I'm a pretty big fan of the open source philosophy plus I'm a microsoft-phobe, so it's a big deal to me.

[Tunnelcat]

To find out if it does: Read the manual.

There ain't no manual for the TV card on my system. Figures. I'll have to search on the net.

LOL satellite internet competitive with terrestrial wired... Not in this universe.

Line sharing doesn't fix everything with broadband, but its a hell of a lot better than allowing private industry to monopolize the infrastructure.

Why I don't want to go with Wireless 4G either. I can't get my local ISP to fess up to the equipment they use.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-575277 ... uawei-zte/

And one company in our local area DOES admit using it, namely Clearwire.

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=226462

This is how private enterprise solves problems, and it isn't in the interest of our nation.

[Foil]

To find out if it does [support CableCard]: Read the manual.

There ain't no manual for the TV card on my system. Figures. I'll have to search on the net.

There are a few different kinds of TV tuner cards for PCs out there. Most work for receiving over-the-air channels, many newer ones will decode unencrypted QAM channels from cable sources (those tend to be the local channels, but it varies widely). The ones with a slot to support CableCards are much less common. A quick glance at the connectors will probably tell you quite a bit.

Since I found 'em cheap one day on eBay, I personally now use two ATI DCTs (the internal version, which is the guts of an external one with an internal bracket and usb connector).

[Tunnelcat]

It's a internal tuner. No CC slot either. The computer is 2 years old and not worth upgrading the tuner, if possible, either.

I've noticed that most of the CableCARD ready TV's are large. Not much in 32 inch 1080i at all.

[snoopy]

It's a internal tuner. No CC slot either. The computer is 2 years old and not worth upgrading the tuner, if possible, either.

I've noticed that most of the CableCARD ready TV's are large. Not much in 32 inch 1080i at all.

If your card is ATSC-compatible, then buy yourself a cheap antenna & you can at least run the over-the-air channels through the PC.

If it's analog only - good luck.

[Tunnelcat]

That's what I've been doing. I've got a big antenna in my attic and I get all the Eugene, OR stations in beautiful HD. KGW 8 in Portland finally got their DT translator working, so I get HD from Portland too. Mind you, I have this setup only on my kitchen PC, which also functions as a DVR. My big main TV is on Comcast and a Comcast DVR.