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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."
I have a pretty spiffy DLP TV, and all I use it for is watching DVDs. I haven't bought any cable or satellite service because nobody will just sell me the channels I want, without insisting on bundling in all the bible-thumpers and home shopping network crap. It feels like getting spammed, and it just pisses me off.
I'm convinced that IPTV is the future, and that's mainly because the cable vendors SUCK.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
;)) to account for this. Every 20 minutes it'd take a 10 minute break. Yep, capped again within two days.
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
Screw cable, when they pull crap like this.. Now if only DSL here in America (Fairfield County, Connecticut especially..) didn't suck.
I think that the same can be extrapolated for Microsoft, don't you?
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Ever do a comparison between cable and satellite? The quality is like night and day. Comcast and Adelphia both have lots of pixelation and the first 80 channels are still analog feeds. They are grainy as hell and one with Adelphia had permanent ghosting from the local UHF channel. Flipping through channels on cable takes longer for the picture to fill in compared to satellite. My parents had a cable modem and it was fine for a few years and then they had tons of disconnects and signal problems. The final straw was the bill increasing $10 in one month. I got them DSL and called to cancel the cable modem. I told them going up $10 was my reason for cancelling. The guy told me it was because we were now on the "silver" plan. I told him it was the same thing as before but under a new name and just cost $10 more. Then he tried telling me their cost for ESPN went up 500%. Well make an ESPN package then, when was the last time you watched a major sporting event on ESPN? Never. Ooops sorry for the rant :)
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
While I think you could tone down the "ignorant masses" routine, I agree with your overall point. As a kid, I did watch a lot of TV, I admit. But to be fair, I do remember growing up to watch cartoons like Muppet Babies, Animaniacs, Pinky and the Brain, The Simpsons before it became Guest Cartoon Celebrity of the Week, etc.
But as I grew up, I just started to watch less and less. I'd occasionally find a show that was worth watching, but it was a rarity.
Now, well, I still watch some, but not really much. Mainly just Cartoon Network for certain anime shows, or something like The Venture Brothers. I'll often keep Comedy Central on just to listen to the Daily Show and Colbert Report as I do something else.
I don't know whether I've grown up (slightly) or if TV has just dumbed down (or both, or we've just become more aware of just how dumb it is), but it's hard to actually devote the effort to actually watch a show when you have better things to do with your spare time. Hell, even if it's just browsing forums for links to news articles or searching Wikipedia, I actually feel LESS insulted on the Internet than I do watching TV.
It's a rather round about way of me saying, basically, that Cable companies need to wake up and learn that they can't just overcharge people for the same crap year after year. It gets old, and some people, albeit maybe not the majority and not all at once, will find alternatives. "What do you mean if I just want 5 channels, I need to order another 45? No way." This is especially true since now even if you don't get a station for that one show you like, you can most likely just find it on YouTube or DVD.
So I just offer them this message: Stop overcharging and forcing people to buy things they don't want, or people will find alternatives, or even, gasp, go without!
I was with you up to the last paragraph. There's no need to come across as an elitist dick.
I know plenty of very smart people (scientists, high-level civil servants etc.) who enjoy TV, even though I personally find very little of it worth watching. Brainless entertainment aids relaxation, provides conversation, or just plain alleviates loneliness - are you saying my grandmother (novelist, historian, honorary doctorate) has an IQ of 79? She can certainly write rings around you.
Soudns almost exactly like a problem I had with Comcast when I first moved into my house. The previous owners used a dish for TV, and since the house is just out of DSL range I have to assume they used dialup for an internet connection. That's relevant because when I moved in I switched everything over to cable (cable TV, cable internet, screw the phone line). During the day, the cable connection was rock solid. Which was useless to me, since I work during the day. During the night, the cable internet connection (but not TV!) would go out as it cooled down. After 8 tech visits, three cable modems, and four months a tech finally thought to check the line at the street. Turns out there was some water damage (rust!) that caused an intermittent connection. During the warm day it would expand just enough to make a connection, but at night as it cooled down the connection would go away. Apparently it still made enough of a connection for TV to get through, but not for internet. A minute later, he had repaired the connection and left, and I haven't had problems since. This was during the spring, so I can just imagine how bad it would've gotten if they hadn't found the problem by winter.
Temperature-related issues like this can be very hard to diagnose, specifically because the techs will never come out at night. If the issue is caused by cooling temperatures at night and the techs come at 10 in the morning, of course the problem's not going to reproduce. I just had to keep getting them to send out techs until I got one that actually knew a thing or two.
In your case, the damage may have been farther up the line, especially if the entire neighborhood had the same problem. In that case, the only thing you can do is to get your neighbors to call in and complain as well. It's like a power outage. If only one person calls in, they're not going to do anything. If three people call in, they might be able to triangulate the position of the problem and think about fixing it. If hundreds of people call in, they know they have a problem and a tech will be immediately dispatched. So, when you have problems like this, call! And get your neighbors to call! If you don't, the service company isn't going to give a crap because you're not making any noise.
I had Verizon for years, but I pretty much had to have them. There are 2 local cable companies in my area, but neither had 2-way cable going to my house. So it was get the phone and the cable service, or just get DSL from Verizon who already supplied my phoneline. Now there are numerous other ISP with DSL, but you need to get a Verizon line, because they are all subcontracted for the fibers. So I told everyone to just forget the alternative and just go with Verizon. You only had to call Verizon, not the Cable company and then Verizon. It ended up being cheaper anyhow. Then the cable companies got moving (and so did I), and now I have 2-way cable and no phone. Its more then Verizon DSL, but now Verizon doesn't offer DSL in my area. I don't have the outages I used to have with DSL, and the cable company is there that day to fix the line if there is a problem. The cable company is one of the oldest anywhere, but its small and has good customer service.
So what has been bothering me about this whole thing? I want the service, and I don't care what the infrastructure looks like. I want to connect to the internet really fast. So I don't care if its DSL or Cable. I always thought there was a better way to deal with the infrastructure, but all I could ever come up with was government run telecommunication lines, kind of like the national roadways. A system not owned by a company, and one which any service provider could use. The problem being this smacks of communism/socialism, and even beyond the political ideals we all know what the roadways look like. I don't know what a pothole looks like on the internet, but its probably got Paris Hilton in it. The government, without another competitor, will probably take forever to fix the problems, and never completely fix it right which returns me to the previous problem.
So what are we left with? I guess I'll stick with my 2-way cable until something better comes along, because at least its better then dial-up. One day everything will be wireless and million little bits will be whizzing by my head, and give me a tumor.
Selex
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.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
monopolies don't care about customers and charge whatever the hell they want, and companies that have to compete at some level will exhibit concern about what their customers want. The only variation on this theme would be a heavily-regulated monopoly (ala the old Bell System) that has enforced service standards. This is hardly news.
Too bad that the FCC doesn't understand something so basic to any economy. Somebody in law enforcement really should take a look at the Commissioners' bank records for the past few years.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.