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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."
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One way to kill a freebie: post it on /.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
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
Basically, if the cable operators want to stop this, it's pretty easy, but the way they're organized makes it more difficult. The frequencies used for cable modem downstreams are typically interspersed with the digital video channels, in the 550-860Mhz range. Cable modem upstream (along with telephony upstream and digital set top box return path, is almost always in the 5-42Mhz range (US values here, int'l mileage can and will vary). To provide cable modem, but no video, all they need to do is place a filter that will block 42-550Mhz. Not hard, but it requires the tech to be aware of both the video and data services the customer is getting. In reality, however, the field techs who handle video, and the ones focused on data, are two different orgs, with different trouble ticketing systems, etc, so the right hand often doesn't know what the left is doing, so getting the right filters in place can be a real pain.
And you can get a free newspaper by holding the door open after someone else buys one.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Considering that it's simply a matter of pointing an antena at your house from a van
The tinfoil on my roof will protect me.
But seriously, point an antenna at my house to find out if I'm wathching cable? I can see checking the neighborhood branch cable's impedence to see if its within the range of what they would expect from the number of subscribers they have, but even that's a ballpark figure (neighbor buys new TV, etc etc). Please explain how they can find anything by pointing an antenna at my house.
A microphone maybe, when I curse them for shitty reception.
it doesn't take a master hacker to figure that one out.
From page 5 of the Motorola/General Instruments SB3100D cable modem manual:
"If you have a TV set attached to the cable outlet, you may need a 5-900 MHz splitter to use both the TV and the SB3100D."
Thats about as plain and simple as it gets.
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Redundant=1, Insightful=6, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=12. (not mine)
After being a cable modem customer for six months, I got a letter from ATT saying that the free cable (TV) was simply part the offer. I called to confirm that I was not being charged for the cable TV and that it was free to use. They said yes, and I've been happily using ATT for cable modem access and cable TV signals for $45/month ever since.
I assumed that this was by design. Maybe this "free cable TV" that they gave me was simply an artifact of getting the interenet access and, rather than discourage people from using it, ATT might have decided to be proactive an make the cable TV a free offer to their appreciated customers.
-Derek
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.
c-hack.com |
I've heard that they check for signal leakage. If you have the wrong combination of splitters, signal amplifiers, and unshielded cables, then you're actually broadcasting the cable signal. Supposedly the cable company sends out vans to check that this leakage is within tollerance. In some cases, they will ask to replace some of your internal wiring so as to reduce leakage. Supposedly they are required by the FCC to keep the leakage under a certain level. (I read it on the Internet, so it must be true.)
I've also heard that you can play the same game and use a high-gain antena to steal cable by capturing the leaking signal from your neighbor's house. I don't know how well that works, though in theory it is possible.
It's a trivial matter to instead of looking for leakage beyond their regular tollerance level to look for any leakage whatsoever from non-subscribers.
I have had to deal with AT&T Broadband in Plano Texas for 2 years now. Twice they have done this bait and switch on me, and this time I figured it out.
When I first moved here, I got the cable modem, and when I hooked my TV up to the outlet... it worked. I have extended basic channels. About a month after they put in my cable modem, a door-to-door guy came and offered a 30-day trial of the premium basic (as many channels as you can get without going digital). We tried the cable for about 20 days, and then I called them to cut it off (cause I'm a cheep ass). They can't and turned it ALL off. It took to weeks to get my cable modem back on, but they never turned back on the basic cable. I called to argue with them, because I thought that basic cable was included. They said that it wasn't included with the modem, and that I was lucky they didn't seek for me to pay them for the months that I was "stealing" cable.
I ended up paying them to turn basic cable back on (which is what they want).
I ended up moving to another apartment, and to do so I basically had to set up new service. Then again, they put the cable modem in and Boom! I had extended basic again. Like clockwork, a month after they put in the cable modem, they sent a door-to-door guy around to offer extended basic. To test my theory (I knew I wasn't going to be there long anyway) I signed up for the 30-day trial. The rest went as expected. 20 days later I called to have the free trial turned off. Off went the cable modem and the TV. Again I paid to have basic service turned back on.
Once again, I moved to yet another apartment. Once again, the cable modem was installed, and magically, the extended basic was as well. 30 days later, I told the door-to-door day 'No Thanks', and I've had extended cable to this day.
Word to the wise... the cable company wants you to get used to the cable, and then rip you for it later.
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.
The double standards on Slashdot are amazing. What's next? An article on how easy it is to shoplift at convenience stores while they take deliveries?
This is not news. I always assumed that I'd be able to steal basic cable from my provider (Cox Communications) by simply hooking into the splitter on my outside wall. But I don't pay for basic cable so I did not do it.
To people in the software industry who are stealing cable: don't get mad if you find out that the cable guy is pirating the software that your company sells.
So what is the point in publishing this story now? I can't believe that the media just found out. It's something most of us have known about for years. We need to figure out what their purpose is in letting more people know about this. Is it just another attempt to point out how many people are stealing? Is it to encourage more people to do it and pull one over on At&T since they're raising prices? Was it a slow news day and they were grasping for content? There's got to be a reason this story was published now. Any ideas?
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
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)
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...
And the "free cable" described here isn't really piracy, as other posters have pointed out. The broadband customers are paying a bit more than those who just want basic cable, and the "free" cable is part of the deal. In fact, this is another reason why the basic bill is so much: The company wants the incremental cost of extra services (Net access, premium channels, etc.) to be so low compared to the $40 you're already paying that you will choose to buy them.
This is a great article.....
So, you have a cable modem hooked up to your cable. This doesn't mean that you are allowed to splice that cable and run it to another device.
OK, since you asked, I used to work overseas and we shared a building with the cable folks. I got to know the techs. There is three very popular ways to detect theft of service. The most common is when checking the system for integrety, they find leakage of the signal. Some cable channels share the commercial airline communications frequencies. Picking up cable channels here is interference in violation of FCC rules (USA). Cable companies usualy use 100% shielded RG-6 cable drops to the house. A pirate drop added to a cable system is typicaly done with braided RG-59 which is only 95% shielded. The leakage usualy isn't enought to get a picture outside the home. The cable company does not even try to receive a picture. They use a sensitive narrow band receiver with a yagi antenna and look for leakage of the video, sound or cable FM radio carrier. Video carriers in the aircraft band is the most common leakage detection as they are picked up as part of FCC compliance checks. Midband cable channels A-I are typicaly channels 14-22 and are just above the FM radio band in the aircraft band. 121.5 MHZ is the aircraft emergency frequency. Leakage on that frequency is a big no-no.
The second method used are using a TDR and measuring the distance to the end of the cable. A splitter tries to keep the impedance to the source to 75 ohm, but it isn't perfect and show up well on a TDR (Time Domain Reflectometry a type of in cable radar checking distance to splitters connections, ends, breaks etc.) A teltale sign of theft of service is the presence of a splitter in the TDR return and two or more diffrent distances to the terminations (6ft to cable modem and 35 foot to TV for instance).
The Third method used is the least reliable. At the head end they run one of the channels through a time base corrector with a set drift (slightly off spec horizontal frequency). During a popular program (superbowl, HBO) the van sniffs for TV's exactly matching this offset sweep speed. The catch here a TV with a noisy sweep circuit from a subscriber can swamp a bootleg reciever's signature as it gets buried in the background noise level. Getting a match in sweep frequency from a TV in a house not subscribing to ESPN or HBO in suburbia can result in enough evedince for a search warrant for the illegal decoder. This is very hard to do in apartments, but not too difficult in surburban areas. They only catch those who happen to be tuned in at the time of the sweep. Those who time shift tape are not detected. The head end stuff is very expensive for this so this is a tool of larger cable companies and cable companies that hire the survey from a 3rd party.
Leakage tests are the most common theft detection when done in conjunction with tap sweeps. TDR's are used in apartments because the temptation to run a wire to the next apartment is high. With the high density, the time to do a TDR audit has high payback results. Changes in cable response can be tied to duration of a tenant stay to make good cases of theft. The arguement of that was the way it was when I moved in doesn't work if they get two recorded TDR records that show the change after you moved in.
As you can see, two of the 3 common detection methods do use an antenna on a van pointed at your house. They look for leakage of the raw cable signal and check the sweep frequency of your TV. TDR sweeps require a tempory outage of the signal and are not done with an antenna on a van.
I hope this helps explain it.
The truth shall set you free!
I installed cable modems all over Oklahoma and Texas for Cox and AT&T. Allow me to enlighten you.
If I were to show up at a new house without cable, I would run a new line to the ped (short for pedestal, also known as a consumer interface or a million other terms). At the ped, if this person didn't already have cable tv and it wasn't part of my work order, I'd slap a 400 trap on the line. The 400 trap blocks everything but the cable modem's frequency range. Trust me, these things work.
Since the pedestal is locked and requires one of three unavailable-to-the-public keys, you won't be pulling this filter anytime soon. Some of you may have access to a broken pedestal but when the cable guy shows up, he'll call it in and it'll get replaced.
Some installers, in a rush, neglect this filter, but it's standard practice to put one on each house/apt/whatever when the customer doesn't already have cable. It's also common practice to split the incoming (master) line to the home and put upstream traps on half the split and connect all t.v. lines to this half of the split. The cable modem gets alot of power (anywhere from -10 to +13db) from this half of the split and the rest of the lines don't send rf interference upstream so the cable modem has a clean path upstream.
I'm mentioning the split/upstream trap because some of you might go rooting around in your attic or somewhere poking around on filters and getting creative with the setup. Don't touch anything. If there's a 400 trap you don't have access to it anyway and if you pull the upstream trap you're setting your cable modem up for poor performance.
So basically, I'd say you probably have a 20% chance of getting cable tv over your cablemodem line, and when you split it, you'll be dumping rf interference into your room because your crimping tools will inevitably be inferior, and your tv will be dumping upstream noise into your cable modem stream. You've been warned, proceed at your own risk.