Post your cable/internet horror stories or amusements here for all to see, regardless of your provider.
I had to have Comcast come out yesterday because my cable modem has been losing signal and resetting on its own 20-30 times a day since the 4th. They start looking at signal levels, and see that they are way low. Ok, fine--get it fixed.
So as they start figuring out where everything is at, I tell them when I finished my basement last year I pre-wired everything within the walls. They weren't happy about that, but screw em. They then ask me what kind of splitters I'm using and where'd I get them, as if that last one matters. I say I got them at Lowes and Home Depot, but I'm using 2.4GHZ splitters. One of them says "well, we use 10,000 on ours." A few minutes later I walk out to the outside splitter and see 0-1000Mhz (e.g. 1 GHZ) on the splitter they provided last time they sent a nitwit out.
Later they start saying that "splitters bought from anyone but Comcast aren't designed to handle data, just TV signal." Problem there is, they all handle digital signal, and last I checked they were pushing internet through digital.
They ended up running a new line to bypass all my inside the wall stuff under my carpet--which I can bloody feel since it crosses the area at the base of my stairs and I'm usually in socks--to a new splitter that comes out of my TV run and off of my self-bought signal booster because they didn't provide me with a system that allowed me to receive all my HD signals when they were troubleshooting THAT after signing up for HD.
At the moment I seem to have better signal strength, but a) it's by chance more than by anything they seem to really know about, and b) it'll probably fail sometime today again knowing my luck.
They didn't even know what ground loop interference was (interference between television signals and audio signals that may be on the same circuit) and why I had a ground loop device on my TV run.
The best part is that they were talking about all these certifications they had earned, and that they had been giving me looks and talks like I was a total idiot. I'm sure they were chatting about this moron who dared run his own inside system on their way to the next job.
Oh, did I mention they were almost 2.5 hours late after the end of the 3-hour window they gave me, which led to a bunch of annoyance at work when I told them I had to bail for the appointment?
Love it.
-Rand
P.S. The other options they discussed were a) coming back SUNDAY to run a line all the way through the rear, unfinished half of my basement, requiring me to move every dang thing back there, and b) hammer-drilling through 4 inches of solid concrete at my back basment wall, drilling through the drywall, and running a line along the floor around the finished part of my room. Did they not think about why I went through the bother of an in-wall run in the first place?
I had to have Comcast come out yesterday because my cable modem has been losing signal and resetting on its own 20-30 times a day since the 4th. They start looking at signal levels, and see that they are way low. Ok, fine--get it fixed.
So as they start figuring out where everything is at, I tell them when I finished my basement last year I pre-wired everything within the walls. They weren't happy about that, but screw em. They then ask me what kind of splitters I'm using and where'd I get them, as if that last one matters. I say I got them at Lowes and Home Depot, but I'm using 2.4GHZ splitters. One of them says "well, we use 10,000 on ours." A few minutes later I walk out to the outside splitter and see 0-1000Mhz (e.g. 1 GHZ) on the splitter they provided last time they sent a nitwit out.
Later they start saying that "splitters bought from anyone but Comcast aren't designed to handle data, just TV signal." Problem there is, they all handle digital signal, and last I checked they were pushing internet through digital.
They ended up running a new line to bypass all my inside the wall stuff under my carpet--which I can bloody feel since it crosses the area at the base of my stairs and I'm usually in socks--to a new splitter that comes out of my TV run and off of my self-bought signal booster because they didn't provide me with a system that allowed me to receive all my HD signals when they were troubleshooting THAT after signing up for HD.
At the moment I seem to have better signal strength, but a) it's by chance more than by anything they seem to really know about, and b) it'll probably fail sometime today again knowing my luck.
They didn't even know what ground loop interference was (interference between television signals and audio signals that may be on the same circuit) and why I had a ground loop device on my TV run.
The best part is that they were talking about all these certifications they had earned, and that they had been giving me looks and talks like I was a total idiot. I'm sure they were chatting about this moron who dared run his own inside system on their way to the next job.
Oh, did I mention they were almost 2.5 hours late after the end of the 3-hour window they gave me, which led to a bunch of annoyance at work when I told them I had to bail for the appointment?
Love it.
-Rand
P.S. The other options they discussed were a) coming back SUNDAY to run a line all the way through the rear, unfinished half of my basement, requiring me to move every dang thing back there, and b) hammer-drilling through 4 inches of solid concrete at my back basment wall, drilling through the drywall, and running a line along the floor around the finished part of my room. Did they not think about why I went through the bother of an in-wall run in the first place?
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