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[David Buehler]

Charlie,

I think these problems exist as a regional problem..

We have had comcast Business Class here at our offices for 2 + years and at my house for 8+ years. At work we have 5 VOIP lines on a dedicated modem with a seperate modem handling the Internet traffic. Now we have had problems, but any time I call comcast, i have a tech, onsite with-in 4 hours  of my call, period.

At home, the only problem I've had not related to service outages (like a car hitting a power pole and taking down the wires) has been the Hard disk in my HD DVR dying after 3 years of full abuse by my wife. Again, comcast has been there onsite, to fix the problem the next day for us, exactly when they said they would.

[SteveKirby]

Maybe some of the sharper sparkys can answer this.  The Comcast system seems to have some floating reference in the bi-directional signal.  Too much gain, or too much attenuation in the received signal and the return signal (used for OnDemand and internet connections) floats the other way and won't work.

When we recently moved I had asked them to just hook up one TV.  So I could hook up the rest myself.  The house had dishes before.  First jackass ripped out bunches of the existing cabling which my wife didn't understand that I intended to re-use to hook up the extra rooms.  So I had to rewire the house.  We got the extra boxes (including the non-interactive extra ones) from the "service center" (worse than going to the DMV) and over the phone I was able to get the interactive boxes "activated".  But we kept getting random connection dropouts in different rooms.  Particularly in the rooms that had a bit more attenuation from the splitters.  So I went and got a line amp and 6way splitter that worked out to neutral gain.  Then the OnDemand stopped working.  Finally gave up and had the service guy come out.  He kept saying that the line amp was the problem, but the ChannelVision specs showed it was bi-directional as was the splitter.  Everything spec'd out okay.  But the service guy kept saying that because the amp provided gain on the TV signal, the return signal was proportionally attenuated.  And if I put a splitter on the line, the return signal would increase by the attenuation of the splitter.  If the return signal was too high, it would not work.  Presumably because of overload distortion or something.  He kept showing me on his general purpose field tester that the signal strength was too high or too low depending on what we put in the line.  Eventually by buying one of their line amps and putting a 3dB inline pad in, we got everything to work.

Sounds like a really dodgy system to me.  That won't allow for any variations in the number of connections unless it happens to line up with the number of taps on some distribution amp they have balanced the gain on.

[Scott Helmke (Scodiddly)]

Bob Leonard wrote on Sun, 23 May 2010 00:03

I look at the list of people responding to the Charlie so far and shake my head. I thought every one of you were some of the brightest bulbs on the tree, but you disappoint me because you still watch TV.

Fixed it for you.  

[Phil LaDue]

Scientific Atlanta makes garbage, and almost every major cable company buys tons of them.

[Dennis Wiggins]

Cable?  What's that?

If it ain't at leat 14ga, don't use it.

-Dennis Wiggins

[Joe Brugnoni]

I worked for TWC cable for 25 years and I can tell you that they do very little any longer to invest in the training of their people.

I had a tech come to my house and did not know I was a retired employee, he spent the first 20 minutes trying to pass the call to another department, never took out a tool, meter or anything!

Long story short, it was a bad two way splitter on the back of the house.

Cable broadcasts down a sealed system and 80 to 90% of all cable issues can be traced to bad F connectors,  If you get a tech to your house and he does not change all of the connectors, at least outside, you have been screwed.  The low band is never an issue but as you get to the hyper band signal loss is dramatic!

INGRESS!!!! OR EGRESS The next biggest issue they never fix, that is why they don't run the local channels on the same freq they are broadcast in, and don't tell me you can not seal it out because before we where bought up, I worked a system the ran the local. 4 , 5 and 9 on those channels and we kept the system tight,, The Gov came up with something called CLI and the cable industry spent more money getting around it than fixing the issues,  Anybody that has leaks will get beats on a lot of channels from pagers and phones but it really will wipe out channels 19 and 20. I forgot the freqs of these channels

IF that is not done water gets in and you never  find it until it has done major damage.

If you installed ANYTHING from radio shack in your house, your asking for trouble, get rid of it!

Bottom line, if you can get a tech to your house and all he/she wants to do is swap a box until he/she finds on that is more tolerant or just happens to lock up for a while, MAKE them service your entire system all the way to the pole or pedestal in your yard.

Do not ever use the cheap ass jumpers that come with VCR'S or any vid units you buy, You need a good piece of coax with at least 80% shield and foil.

IF you had some old RG 59 and they installed RG 6 in you house, you will find you can have connection issues in your equipment if you install something with a center conductor smaller that RG 6. It spreads the tabs in the connector and if you go back to a smaller center conductor, sometimes it will not make good contact and on digital, its critical.