Learning to Love the Cable Guy

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times and C|Net are reporting on new good will gestures from big cable companies. As service monopolies increasingly became the norm, quality of service began to decline across the board. Now, though, with a number of alternatives cropping up, cable companies are beginning to realize the need to ensure customers say with the often imposing service companies." From the article: "[As] service has improved slowly as satellite providers, upstart phone carriers and cell phone companies have provided attractive alternatives. And now that cable and phone companies are starting to sell similar bundles of phone, broadband Internet and television products--known in the industry as a triple play--they risk losing subscribers forever if they do not keep them happy."

Screw cable

[spectral]

Perhaps when the local cable company decides to stop having arbitrary, confusing, and most importantly secretive policies about what I'm allowed to do with their service and what I'm not allowed to do, I'll believe this, but they don't want me on their network since I actually use it.

Case in point: recently they upgraded my service from 10mbit / 2mbit to 15mbit / 2mbit. To do this, they had an unannounced, planned outage for 6 hours starting at midnight on a Friday night. I called and had to talk to someone before I could even verify that my service was interrupted, the person said that it was their policy to not announce these things since security systems might rely on the cable connection, and they wouldn't want potential thiefs to know when to strike. Oh, and even if they DID announce them, no one would listen (if it was on a web page) and they might not have the $(cable_company)'s email account so they couldn't use that either. Great, so now I can't find another way to protect my home (if my security system uses the cable internet / phone service), way to go guys.

The worse one though: If I use "more than my reasonable amount" of upstream bandwidth, I'll have said bandwidth capped to 20kbyte/s. I've had this happen to me, I called and they said they'd reply to this issue within 24-48 hours. 117 hours later (and three phone calls from me counting the first) they called me back and said that they sell "burst, not stream". They couldn't explain that any better, but said that long connections were against the rules and that games like World of Warcraft (I asked specifically) were ways to get capped. I apparently need to take a break every so often or else I'll have my connection throttled?

A friend has it happen to him, he actually got numbers out of the person. Outgoing connections (wtf?) can't last more than 20 minutes or else risk being capped, so he set his bittorrenting (probably not at all legal either ;)) to account for this. Every 20 minutes it'd take a 10 minute break. Yep, capped again within two days.

Screw cable, when they pull crap like this.. Now if only DSL here in America (Fairfield County, Connecticut especially..) didn't suck.

Re:Cox cable

[whoever57]

Cox cable in Hampton Roads has lost me as a customer forever. The inability to provide a reliable broadband connection just screwed the deal.

Did Cox attempt to do anything to fix it? About 6 months after I moved house, my cable Internet connection (Comcast) became very unreliable. I had moved less than one mile, so it was clearly a local problem (the cable Internet was rock solid at the old house). The cable company sent someone out and he found that the original installer had put a curve in the cable with too small a radius. He re-profiled the bend in the cable and my Internet connection has been solid ever since.

Re:How about just letting me buy what I want?

[JPriest]

There have been some conflicting studies on this (search: cable la carte), but the cable companies say the end result is that it would end up costing you more money to select only the things you want. For example, cable companies get paid to carry the home shopping channel and if you drop it you will end up paying more for the other chans. Part of the problem also spawns from the fact that many channels are still analog and it would be pretty much impossible to exclude or include just some of the analog channels.

The cable companies _could_ make everything digital only over night but they risk bricking millions of TV's that have just analog tuners and no cable card support. I suspect that once analog channels go the way of the Dodo bird, a la cart programming will be a possibility, but at that point the broadcast flag could also become possible.

Re:How about just letting me buy what I want?

[aussie_a]

Part of the problem also spawns from the fact that many channels are still analog and it would be pretty much impossible to exclude or include just some of the analog channels.

Bullshit. Australian cable companies have done this from year dot (I believe about 1997?). If they can do it (and they've only recently switched to digital) why can't America? Isn't Australia suppose to be less advanced then America?

Re:How about just letting me buy what I want?

[jeaton]

In the case of the shopping channels, most often you're not only not paying for them, the channel creator actually pays the cable company to carry the station. This is why the even the lowest tier offered by the cable company includes all of the shopping channels.

In addition, often times the content providers write into the cable companies contracts bundling requirements. For example, if a given tier includes ESPN, then it must also include ABC Family (not necessarily true for those exact two channels, but the idea is true). So in those cases, your cable company is contractually forbidden from selling you just one of the channels.

This comes up all of the time, and the situation hasn't changed.

Re:Screw cable

[guruevi]

I would have your contract with them checked and maybe even run it through a lawyer. I am looking into sattelite myself because I can't get DSL or Cable here and in those contracts it states exactly when I would get capped (after x-amount of Gbytes/hour for x-amount of continuous hours) and to what rate it would get capped to (64kbit/s). I calculated it and it would mean that I can stream constantly (24/7) 256 kb/s down while my line is actually 10M bursting. If I put this in an ever-adapting rate-limiting script I can actually get continuous broadband.

Re:Is the cable service TERRIBLE everywhere?

[pixelite]

i work for a cable company as a service tech, and i can assure you that we have set time frames, within a two hour time frame, for appointments. During the summer, we also have all day appointments to accomodate our customers that need service sooner than we have available appointments. i think that is a reasonable way of handling service calls considering houw busy we get in the summer

Re:Cable blows

[Anonymous Coward]

I got Comcast a few months ago, and they just tried the ESPN line with me. Funny thing is, I signed up with a fixed rate one year contract. They also raised my Broadband costs ~2.5x after 3 months and claimed it wasn't under the contract.

Needless to say, I'll be canceling after the 1 year. I probably don't have the money or the time to take them to Civil Court to have them ruled in default. Not to mention the possibility of ending up with something "accidentally" on my credit report.

Oh, and FYI about the cable modem issue. My parents and I (seperately, with different cable providers, I don't live with them) had this problem with a PCX2200 model modem. Turned out it was the modem failing both times. I actually got mad and ripped the modem's secure torx case open (It was mine, not rented) and discovered the solid state electronics inside where making a rather annoying screeching/keening noise regardless of if it was pluged in to the data wires or not.

Not just that...

[DragonPup]

Cable companies must carry local stations. If the specific shopping network is over the air, the cable provider(in the US at least) must carry it.

Main Problem: I can't build a cost-effective PVR

[edashofy]

I've recently investigated the possibility of building my own MythTV (or similar)-based PVR machine. My requirements are pretty simple:

1. Onscreen guide with no ads showing only the channels I actually receive
2. Ability to record as much video as the hard drives in the box will hold
3. Multiple tuners so I can watch and record a couple different channels simultaneously.

I would also optionally like the ability to record HDTV content in the anticipation that someday I will have an HDTV.

I do not want to do a single illegal thing with my DVR. I want to do timeshifting of programs. That's all. I promise I will not even copy them to my computer or share them with friends. This is a purely selfish project.

I can get a dual-tuner DVR from my cable company for $SMALLNUM per month, but they've recently put ads on my non-DVR box's guide, won't show me just the channels I get (instead of channels I don't get, which are an ad for those channels), have limited storage capabilities, and a maximum of two tuners.

Unfortunately, it's 100% impossible to build such a box - at least, not cost effectively. In my area, they've basically cut analog cable service down to channels 2-13, plus eight bible stations, five home shopping stations, and ten foreign language stations. So, if you want to watch, say, Mythbusters, you MUST subscribe to digital cable. You have no choice.

I could get a decoder card that can decode a digital cable signal, which may or may not work, depending on whether my cable company has decided to encrypt the signal. If I'm extraordinarily lucky, I will be able to decode basic cable, but I will not be able to ever decode a premium channel like HBO. Even if I'm lucky, my cable company could (without notice) decide to encrypt the channels at any moment.

But but but, you say, CableCARD is coming, and that will let you get three CableCARDs for your three tuner boards and then build your ultimate DVR! Ah, if this were true. Sadly, it looks like you won't be able to install CableCARDs in anything the Cable company doesn't sell or authorize. Oops.

The only reasonable option is to rent one cable box per tuner. For a three tuner system, I'd need three digital cable boxes. Even if I were willing to pay the exorbitant monthly fee, then I will only be able to record HDTV from a small number of channels and not premium channels. And then only if I get the cable box that already has a DVR built in, because that's the one with the firewire port on it.

As much as it sucks, the DVR from the cable company gives me a two-tuner DVR that can tape all my premium channels, even HDTV programs, directly off the digital signal (i.e., I don't even believe it's turned into analog as it would be in a MythTV setup) with a single box. This is just plainly unacceptable.

If anyone has a good alternative for me or will point out something I'm missing, PLEASE let me know.

Re:Screw cable

[spectral]

I understand the difference (at least, I think I do.. software engineer dealing with network programming, and went through ccna training at my high school but didn't bother with the test), but their "security team" sure as hell doesn't seem to.

World of Warcraft is relatively low bandwidth, I've seen my friend's bandwidth charts when him and his wife were both raiding at the same time. Didn't go very high at all. I can't imagine that duration the connection has been open matters more than the amount of data being sent continuously which is why I specifically asked about WoW, and they said that it was the connection time, not data rate.

The previously mentioned friend who got numbers from them got them to admit a little bit about what was happening, they said that whenever there was a problem on the line, even a momentary hiccup, they capped the highest uploader, automatically. They didn't describe what metrics they used or over what timeframe, to be able to determine that.. *sigh*.

It has me paranoid, I want to use my internet connection but I don't want it to be capped. Which is rather silly, since why don't I just use it, get capped, and use it more? What's the point of being afraid to use it so that I later might get capped, and then be able to use it slower? *grr*. So while I would like to video chat with my friends, is that too much bandwidth? I don't know, and they won't tell me.

Re:How about just letting me buy what I want?

[Squalish]

Cable card has its flaws - unlike boxen, it's not capable of transmitting info, and the best means of simulcasting digital (often HD) and analog cable involves neighborhood-level switching, so that the regional office is only transmitting the 60 stations or so that your community is watching to the neighborhood master switchbox.

Cable card capability was here... and the feature (which was a slight price markup) is disappearing from production sets, on the basis that consumers as a whole, really don't care. Congress and the FCC doesn't design and market technologies well.

Cable Card 2.0 has been spoken of, with additional features.

Re:How about just letting me buy what I want?

[JPriest]

Yes I do, they CAN restric specific channels over the wire but blocking it from the head end would impact everyone, how for instance would they allow me to get a specific channel but prevent my neighbor from getting it? The only way to do this with analog channels would be with analog filters placed on the tap to each home. Look at some cable filters [cableboxfilters.com] and you will see that filters tend to be pretty limited dumb equipment (eg high pass or low pass). Becasue of the way filters work you can't just filter every other or every 3rd 6 MHz channel to allow an a la cart analog service. Enabling this would take a series of filters (at best) that would create large point of failure and be a nightmare to manage on a per home basis.

Think of it like broadcasting an FM radio station and trying to pick and choose who can receive it, the only possible way to do it would be to install a filter on _every_ FM antenna. Encrypting the data and selling the key is the only solution that makes sense.

Re:How about just letting me buy what I want?

[AndersOSU]

Personally I think that a la carte programming is a terrible idea, and here's why:

Slashdoters have bemoaned the quality of "popular" programming like survivor, Dr. Phil, and Friends for time immemorial. If a la carte programming were to become the norm it is my opinion that the more esoteric channels would either be more expensive, or unavailable. Basically eliminating bundling would also eliminate indirect subsidies for a lot of less popular, but wholly worthwhile channels.

If I had to guess if the free market (a misnomer if there ever was one) decided the price for television programming I'd be paying more for fewer channels.

this information may be of help

[Anonymous Coward]

having done work on cable and sattelite systems as part of my profession, I've learned quite a bit.

1. Cable companies' signal sucks because of all the splitters. Many technicians will come up and put in 2way after 2way after 2way, and put the digital boxes on the last ones... WTF are they thinking? the proper way is to do a 2 way (one to your cable modem, rest for TV), an amp for the TV signals, and then all the TVs off of one big splitter. I've found this to be the best way for most houses since the cable companies don't amp the signals the way they should. If you're lucky enough though, you can get away with just one big splitter if the original signal into your house is strong enough.

2. on modems you can check your signal, go to 192.168.100.1 and you can see all of the diagnostic stuff. see http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=119 7 [speedguide.net] for more information on what a nominal signal level is.

3. tcniso.net offers an interesting deal (the "company" itself is cheezy, but the end product is nice) it's rather illegal, but I err, know a guy who knows a guy, that uses it and he doesn't have any port limitations and gets 9mbps down and 1mbps up, hosts some websites, and has yet to be shutdown, filtered, or anything!

4. Dish sattelite trumps all other services for picture quality and quantity of HD channels

5. Most security systems have a hard time working with VoIP systems do to the way the compression works, and most companies will not support someone who wants to use their security system with VoIP due the the lack of reliability.

6. I should really stop reading/posting to slashdot right now because I'm going to be late for school... :/

7. check out avsforum.com and search for your cable service thread, there's usually TONS of great information and tips about how to improve your signal, any upcoming issues that the cable co's don't want you to really know about, etc.