What Free Cable?

suckass writes: "Apparently if you've got a cable broadband connection from AT&T you can get free basic cable just by splitting the line that goes into your cable modem. News.com has a story about it here."

Comments

Not for long...

[bytesmythe]

RoadRunner (provided by Time Warner in Austin, TX) requires you to purchase basic cable in addition to your cable Internet service. I'm sure AT&T will soon follow suit.

That explains it

[delphin42]

This is probably why they wouldn't offer me a cable internet subscription without at least basic cable.

Grr!

[zaffir]

I was told that any split in the line running to my modem would cause connection and interferrence problems (the installation guy ran a whole new drop from the pole outside my house). Wonder if that's really true?

They Get Money Anyway

[clinko]

I have ATT cablemodem at my house. Here's how they get their money back.

If you're not ordering cable, and only the cablemodem they charge you an extra 10 dollars.

So... my total comes out to about $55 a month for cablemmodem. Plus tax...

So... Total: $60+ a month for cablemodem

Re:They Get Money Anyway

[mosch]

There's no scam for comcast either.

Basic cable modem for cable customers is $39.95/mo.
Basic cable modem for non-cable customers is $54.95/mo
Basic cable is $12.95/mo

Thus, for me, it's actually cheaper to pay for cable, than to steal it.

Where does all the $$ go?

[jcsehak]

Everyone I know gets charged about $40/month for basic cable (except in CT, where it's a reasonable $10). Why is it so high? Are they still recouping costs from laying the actual cables? I dunno, they've been around for years, sometimes decades. And don't they make enough money from advertisers? Anyone else remember when cable first came out, they said your monthly fee was so you didn't have to watch commercials? So much for that. I wouldn't mind forking over $40/month if they gave me a good reason why it needed to be that high. Unfortunately, it seems like they're overcharging just because they can, and that's one of the best ways to promote piracy.

Re:Easy to catch

[terrymr]

In England where you're required to have a TV License to watch TV they have vans that drive around trying to detect such leakage from unlicensed TVs.

The also have handheld units for checking apartment buildings too.

Re:Easy to catch

[tftp]

If you have the wrong combination of splitters, signal amplifiers, and unshielded cables, then you're actually broadcasting the cable signal.

Nonsense.

You don't have any signal amplifiers, and what "unshielded cables" you are talking about? Coax cable is shielded.

What one could possibly do is to use a reflectometer to measure where the signal reflects off of irregularities in the line. Unterminated coax connector would reflect everything; a connected TV would absorb everything and reflect nothing. However this is far from being reliable, and is very laborous, and depends on who installed the cable and when and how, and so on... It is much cheaper to just go on with your life and sell more cable packages to someone who pays, rather than chasing ghosts of people who don't want to pay and are skilled enough to get away with that.

On a different note, there is nothing to watch on cable anyway. Why would anyone want one?

definitely worth the risk

[SethJohnson]

In Austin, Tx, the penalty for cable TV theft is a Class C Misdemeanor. That's the equivalent of a $50 ticket. The city govt. finally reduced it about two years ago because they were having a bitch of a time prosecuting people under whatever harsher class of crime it was. It was impossible to get a jury to go along with a prosecution of a crime to which there are no witnesses, fingerprints, and the following defenses are available:

1. It was running when we moved in. I thought it was free.

2. There are three people living in this house. Which one of us goes to jail? Who do you think hooked up the line? Do you have fingerprints?

3. Isn't it possible one of your installer techs forgot to unhook the cable from the last time this house was subscribed?

4. We were getting cable tv? We don't even have a tv in the house!

Also, don't worry about some van driving by with an antennae. The real enforcement is a guy walking down the alley checking the connection points and tracing lines to homes. He compares what he finds to his clipboard, then when he finds someone in violation, he knocks on the door to offer them the opportunity to pay for a cable subscription so he won't turn them in. This fellow is paid by commission for the number of people he signs up. The best response to him is the afformentioned, "We don't have a tv set. It is the devil's appliance."

Re:Easy to catch

[Bert Peers]

Well I'm not sure how but there must be some way to detect it -- since it happened to me. I didn't have cable TV since I don't have a TV, but after getting a TV card I decided to split and lo and behold, all channels were there. This was after 3 years or so of internet only. But sure enough, after about 6 months they install a filter, so my guess is that I made the split in such a crappy way that it introduced noise on the neighbor's signals (I live in an appartment), they complained, and voila. This is probably like messing with the telephone, you're not allowed to hook up selfmade electronics, but until someone complains about their reception, how will they know. I think the scenario of van-driving cable-polizei is a bit expensive for the very low percentage that doesn't own both -- and they don't just run lists of internet-only customers either since, like I said, it was ok for 3 years.

What's kinda interesting though is that the area around 500 Mhz shows some leakage, maybe the filter is not perfect, or maybe they need to leave that area open because somehow internet hookup requires it -- but in any case that leakage leaves a few channels through. Didn't bother to drop the filter though since nothing interesting was ever on anyway :)

(BTW this is all with UPC in Europe)

Re-broadcasting the signal

[swb]

People do unwittingly broadcast cable TV, by hooking up thier rooftop antenna to the same coax system in some way.

In 1981 we got our first VCR and a camera (dad's business needed a major writeoff). Since I was in 8th grade, I was in charge of hooking it up. According to the documentation, you were absolutely not to hook up the RF Out of the VCR to your rooftop antenna -- it'd make you into your own TV station and the FCC would take away your bike, your baseball glove and make you eat unsweetened cereal for the rest of your life.

Naturally the idea of a video camera and the chance to be our own TV station was too tempting. However, it didn't really work. We had the highest house in our neighborhood and a big antenna on the roof, but we couldn't get our home TV channel (playing lip-sync videos and slow-motion Lego crashes) to come in on any of the neighborhood TVs, all of which were broadcast based since we didn't have cable in Minneapolis.

I guess its a good thing that I didn't know about amplifiers then...

Re:Crappy moderation...

[Eil]

Uh, crack down on what exactly? They know damn well you're going to watch the basic cable that comes along with it. That's why the friggin service costs $50.

Check with all the other posts in this article: most of their cable companies make you subscribe to basic service and then add like $20 on top of that for broadband. Either way, it works out to around $50. I subscribe to Comcast, and the only difference here is that they charge $50 for the boardband and then imply that basic cable service comes free with the deal.

To wit: There's nothing sneaky going on, there's nothing the cable companies don't already know. You can't pirate that which is offered for free. It seems clear that C|net has written a very troll that the slashbots latched onto right away.