Category: Rant

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Comcast, TiVO and Frontier Communications

I have been a Comcast customer for a while now, and have not really had problems with their service until recently. It has all started with the switch to the “full digital” cable system. I had problems with their dta’s (here and here). Now I am having problems with their Billing department and cable card “services”.  Back in June I decided to get a TiVO to be an “hd tuner” for the bedroom HDTV. This is when the fiasco with their cable card started. I was told by Comcast reps online that the Cable Card was free, since it would be the first one on the account. This was awesome, till I got the bill and found out they were charging me for it. I talked to them again, and they removed the charge.

Well in November when I got the 2 dta’s, something happened and they started charging me $6.99 a month for the cable card, that was supposed to be free. So I contacted Comcast, and they said “sorry” and took the charge off. Well December rolled around and the charge was back. Since then I have been having a fight with Comcast over false advertising and the failure to properly document their prices in public view. It has gone back and forth about 11 times. Just recently they sent me the Morgantown Price sheet, which is not available any where online that I could find, so here it is Rate Card Morgantown. What they fail to tell you is that if you have ANY of their cable boxes (hd, sd, hd/dvr) you can NOT get a cable card for free, contrary to what I was told in June which lead to the decision to buy the TiVO. So now I am stuck paying $3.00 a month for a cable card. Which means my cable bill is now even more expensive than it was before. I am going to file an FCC complaint over all of this as well, to say that the order of “devices” dictates the price of the service is pure bull shit.

Then while I am bitching to them about the prices, it appears that either something changed on the TiVO side or the Comcast side and I started having problems with about 24 digital channels. When I would tune to say  BBC America, it would be normal for a couple of seconds and then freeze for a couple seconds, then be normal, ad nauseam. So I spent a couple of hours on a friday night clicking through all 250+ channels that I get. Out of them I found out which ones had the problems. I then went and mapped every channel to the QAM / RF channel it was allotted. And guess what they were all around the same general area. What is weird, was BBC America was one that I was having problems with, then all of the sudden they turned off The Weather Channel on the analog side, BBC America started working and The Weather Channel started having problems. For those interested, here is the list that I and some other people are having problems with:

I ended up calling Comcast to come out and replace the cable card, because I thought that was the problem. Well the guy showed up, and was not exactly the friendliest person I have met from Comcast. He seemed like it was a “stupid call”. So he started looking around and I showed him what was happening with the TiVO. He then said he would be back. When he came back in the house, he had some new cable and some tools. He proceeded to cut every end off of every cable in my bedroom and pull out all the cable and replace it with his “new” cable. Well that did not work. So he asked where the cable came in to the house. I took him to where every cable home run’s back to. He got so confused that I had to explain what was going on. It then seemed like he was pissed for some reason. Once again pulled out the snips and cut every end off of every cable and the put new ones on. Still didn’t fix the problem. So I asked if he had brought a cable card to replace the one in the TiVO. He hadn’t brought one. He left and went back to the local office and picked up a card and came out and replaced it. Well the channels are still messed up. So he said it had to be  the TiVO’s problem because the Comcast boxes “were working fine” and took off.

So now I was like hmm, this freaking sucks as I know the finger pointing game is going to start, but I got on TiVO’s chat and started talking to them. They had me reboot the TiVO a couple of times, but that did not fix any of the problems. He suggested that I call their phone support as they would have some better things to have me try. I did and they had me read off some signal levels and look at the “RS Uncorrected” and “RS Corrected” counters. He did not like the numbers on there and basicly said that it was a Comcast problem and the signal was dirty coming in to the house. But he also said he was going to go talk to some one else and call me back in an hour. An hour went by and he did call me back. This time he said he talked to some supervisors and they would like to replace my TiVO because they thought one of the tuners may be bad in it. He told me he would ship me a new TiVO since mine was only a few months old and that they would leave my current one active until I made the swap so that I could get all the shows off of my current one and on to the new one. I thought that is good, at least they aren’t like Comcast and just replace it and you lose everything.

Well today, I got stuck at home because of 3/4 inch of ice all of the driveway, and UPS showed up with the “new” TiVO. To my surprise it wasn’t new, it was a refurb. Not only that there were no cables in the box, so I could not power it on and the current one on at the same time to copy any thing over. This made me extremely pissed. Not only had they lied to me (the tech guy stressed more than once that he was going to make sure I got a new TiVO and not a refurb) but now I couldn’t even test it.

Well here is where the power of Social networking comes to help. One little bitch, and with in a couple of minutes some one from TiVO is asking for details. Then about 3 hours later, I got a call from the Executive relations people. He said he was sorry for the confusion and would be sending me a cable pack to get the current refurb one running. He also said that if the refurb that was sent did not work, he would send me a brand new one.

Fast forward about 40 minutes, and I was talking to Justin and found out that he is having problems on his TiVO with the exact same channels that I am. So now it is definitely a Comcast or TiVO problem and not a problem with my box, unless his which is a different model also developed the same problems at the same time.  Needless to say, I called the TiVo guy back and left a message that I think there is a bigger problem than just my box.

So you are probably thinking by now, if you have read this far, what the hell does this post have to do with Frontier Communications? Well not really anything, other than something weird happened last night and they are a “service provider” in the area, not that I am a client. I have not had a land line phone in the house since about October 2007 when I canceled the Verizon line in favor of using Packet 8 VOIP, which I have been using since June of 2004. Well I had left the phone in the kitchen hooked up to the old “Verizon” line even though it was dead. Don’t know why, just did. Well while I was putting memory in my laptop last night, the kitchen phone started ringing. It took me a minute to figure out what it was, because I hadn’t heard that phone ring in probably 4 years. I went in and picked it up and there was some one on the other side asking for some one who obviously doesn’t live here. After saying “sorry wrong number”, I hung up and then picked the phone up again. Freaking weird to hear a dial tone on it. So I called my self and my other phones rang. Now I had the phone number of this new “phantom” line. This was pretty weird. So I disconnected the phone from the line, as I didn’t want to hear it ring again if I had some one elses phone mapped to my house.

Once again a little Social networking and with in a few minutes I had a contact at Frontier Communications who was asking for information. I gave her the details and told her that the dial tone is a “weird” dial tone type. Needless to say I have not heard back from her yet, but last time I checked, the dial tone still exists, so I bet they are trying to figure out where the “wires” got crossed.  Some friends suggested I make some overseas calls, and some 900 number calls, or act like I am the people they are calling. But the weird part is the phone has not ringed at all today. So maybe they just assigned a phone to my house and the number is not assigned to any one and the other night was just a fluke?

All in all, I hope TiVO and Comcast get their system/signals worked out as it sucks to be paying such a high price for a service and not be able to use it completely.

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Comcast, DTA’s and once again the rise of the cable box

Comcast has decided to “digitize” everything, leaving maybe only local OTA channels on the analog side of their cable plant. I have seen this coming for a while and it has been making me more frustrated as time goes on. Right now I have 4 TV’s in the house 2 of which are analog only, and 2 of which are NTSC/ATSC/ClearQAM capable. 2 weeks ago Comcast sent me a letter saying that “if you don’t have a cable box or DTA (Digital Transport Adapter) on each of  your TV’s you will cease to get the all the channels you get now on the analog side. I thought oh great here it comes, more money to the big ass Comcast to be able to continue to use my current analog tv’s.

So I went to Comcast’s “DigitalNow” web site and started reading that they would give you up to 2 DTA’s FREE in order for up to 2 TV’s to continue to receive limited/expanded basic channels. So I placed the order for 2 of them. They were supposed to be here on Monday, however when I checked UPS’ website, it showed that Comcast did not put my correct address on the shipping label and UPS couldn’t deliver the package. I called UPS and they refused to deliver it or change the address as Comcast had placed a mark on it that only they could change it. So I called Comcast and spent almost a half an hour on the phone (both wait time and talking time) trying to make them understand what they had did wrong. They finally had the light bulb moment and said she had to call me back.

She called me back and said that I had to go to UPS to pick it up. (UPS told me that they would charge them to change the address on it, so Comcast cheaps out again.) I stopped by UPS on Tuesday night to pick up the package and came home to hook them up. Well as luck would have it one is DOA and won’t sync or activate at all. I let it sit for about 2 hours before I contacted Comcast. Needless to say their online help people were useless.. Basically told me to unplug it and plug it back in and then let it sit for 45 minutes. Well I left it sit for 1440 minutes, and still does not work. So now I am going to have to take it to the local office to get a new one.

The one thing that makes me made about these little DTA’s (They are a PACE DC50X box), is that they only get the limited and expanded basic channels. When I signed up for them, it didn’t say this anywhere. I was assuming that it would be able to receive all the channels I currently get with the regular set top box and tivo. However while I was talking to the online rep, that is when I found out that they only get limited and expanded basic.

So now I was even more pissed, because I was under the assumption that I was going to be able to watch the full spectrum (minus the ondemand and hd channels) on these 2 tv’s. Well the reason why they only get limited and expanded basic is easy to understand when  you learn that these aren’t really cable boxes. They are in fact just a little QAM tuner, the same that is in most new TV’s. The only difference between it and your TV one is that all the limited and extended basic channels have the privacy flag set. (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3570). In simplest form, these little DTA’s can receive channels that have the privacy flag set, whereas your TV “ignores” them because they are lightly encrypted.

What does this mean? Well we have went back to the 70’s and 80’s when it was required that each TV have a “cable box” because they don’t know how to tune the channels, once again making TV’s not really a TV but more of a monitor. In reality what is happening is Comcast is trying to pack so much “crap” in to the cable lines that they can no longer put filters on the cables coming in to your house to “block” channels you are not supposed to be getting. The kicker to this whole problem is I have heard that Comcast is thinking about getting rid of the limited basic tier (basicly local channels only) and making every one get the “digital starter” which is the equivalent of all the channels that these DTA’s can receive. So why the hell doesn’t Comcast just take the privacy flag off, junk these DTA’s (for those people who have TV’s with QAM tuners in them), and set the PSIP values so that the channels “appear” on the correct channels.

Not only would it make sense, less hardware they would have to maintain. Less power consumption for the consumers (you can NOT turn these DTA’s off, there is no power button, and if you have the DTA off for a while supposedly you have to reactivate it?) . It would also be less confusing for people so they don’t have yet another remote to have around the house.

So I plead with Comcast, Just make the channels in ClearQAM and stop the box madness. Because I will not pay any more money to get “real cable boxes” when you are forcing everyone to have a cable box for every tv in the house.

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Why Thin Provisioning is bad

In this day and age everyone is trying to squeeze the last little drop out of every technological advance that they can. One of the technologies that is “big” is called Thin Provisioning. Basic in short terms, thin provisioning is where you tell a computer that you have X GB of disk (usually from a SAN or in VMware) but in reality you only have <X GB of disk backing it. This is big right now in SAN and VMware because enterprise disk is “expensive”. But is it really worth the cost? No!

See the main reason people (SAN or VMware admins) use Thin Provisioning is to “save” disk space. Say you have a server that performs one function and does not really use a lot of disk space, say a DNS server (either virutalized or physical booting from a SAN).  Now most admins usually like to keep all their servers with a standard config. So for the sake of this post, lets say the boot disk for this server is 50GB. Now once the OS and app is installed on it, it may only be using 4 GB of that 50GB disk.

Before thin provisioning that 50GB as far as a SAN admin is concerned is 50GB used. So in comes Thin Provisioning, now the SAN admin says “hey mister computer here is your 50GB disk ;-)” But in reality it only allocates as much space as being used by the server. So now on the SAN instead of a full 50GB “used” only 4GB would be used. Sounds awesome in theory, but what happens when  you add other servers in that same SAN pool (say the pool is 100GB in size). So the server admin gets another “50GB” disk from the SAN, doesn’t realize thin provisioning is in use, so they go on and install that server. Now we have 8GB in use out of the 100GB pool, but in reality all 100GB has been allocated as far as the 2 servers are concerned.

The next part is when the whole process starts to drown. The server admin asks for another disk, this time 200Gb for say a database or code repository server. Well the SAN administrator says “ok here is your 200GB disk ;-)” But put the disk in the same 100GB pool that the other two servers are in because “he knows” you won’t use all “200GB”. We have now over committed disk however the server admin does not know this has happened. Once the third servers OS has been installed (another 4GB) everything seems to be fine, and technically it is because we are only using 12 GB out of the 100GB pool. But in reality the servers are using 300GB of disk, because they are unaware that there is no space issues.

Where the fun starts is when you start loading data in to those disks. Lets say the second server was going to be a small database server, so we load Oracle and create some table spaces. We end up using up about 40 of the 50GB alloted to it. (So now we are up to 48GB of disk used in the 100GB pool). Still technically ok, but with only 52GB free we need to really start worrying about the disks and the servers. The fun begins when we start loading data on to the server with the 200GB disk. Once we get up to 52 GB used in this we have some problems. Basically all the servers will start reporting write errors or other weird issues. The server admin can’t figure out what the problem is because when he looks at the servers he see plenty of “free” space on the servers. When stuff gets really weird is when processes start dying and they won’t start when you try to restart them (maybe they write to a log file, etc). So the first thing the Server admin will try to do is reboot the server. This is where all hell breaks loose…

See when you start rebooting servers it can’t flush out writes to the disk because there is “no” space left to write to. So the file-systems end up becoming corrupted. When the server reboots, it will try to write more to the disk thinking that it has plenty of free space, but again can’t, so stuff starts hanging. So of course a reboot is done again, and again, etc…

So now you start seeing write errors showing up every where on the other servers, and from the looks it may be a SAN issue, like the disk has disappeared. So you call the SAN admin only to find out that you have been thin provisioned.

This my friends is why thin provisioning is bad and should NEVER be used. Yes it may save you some money on disk, but what you save there will be wasted when you have down time rebuilding servers and restoring data.

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Marriott Hotels and Internet Access

I spend a lot of my time away from home in Marriott Hotels around the world. One thing I can never understand is their Internet access policy. I was in Washington DC 2 nights ago staying at one of the upper end Marriott’s (around $300 a night) I turned on my iPod to see if I could get on the Internet to check my mail. To my surprise the Internet cost was I believe $14.95 for a 24 hour period. What I have failed to understand is why is it when staying at say a Courtyard Marriott or a Residence Inn Marriott that the Internet is free, and the room is like $80 to $90 a night. But when I stay at the high end Marriott’s (Like JW Marriott in Washington DC, or London Park Lane in London, England) that they always charge for Internet access. It was nice to see that the Washington Marriott did havt LG HDTV’s in the room with actual HD TV service, but it would have been nice if the wireless Internet was free as well.

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TiVo and comcast part 2

Finally getting around to writing about the second appointment with Comcast last friday afternoon. This time the Comcast dude called me at about 10 minutes after 2pm to say he was on his way. (Yeah!) So he shows up (real comcast person and not a contractor this time). He also brought 3 cable cards with him, thanks to @comcaststeve for making sure that note was made and for Jason (the comcast tech) for also bringing extra.

The first thing we did was check the current one that was put in almost a week prior. Yup, still not activated. So we pulled it and put a “new” one in. Jason called the Comcast office and they “sent the signal” well we waited and chatted for a about 30 minutes, and it never got the signal. So another call back and this time a different person. He seemed to think he was “better” than the last person and that the last person didn’t know what they were doing. Well this guy didn’t either, as the signal he sent to the card was the “kill one” which basically inactivated the card. But we did not know this until another 30 minutes past and we called in again because no signal had been received.

So they had us put in the another card and they sent the signal again. Still no go, so they put the final card in. I am not entirely sure what they did on their side, but the card finally said it was activated (the woman on the phone kept talking to some other techs in the back about what to send to it to make it ‘work’.) Well it finally started “working” and I could finally get all the channels I pay for, (which is basically everything) so Jason left and I finally have full HD cable in the bed room. All told there were 4 cable cards used, 2 onsite techs, probably 6 phone techs and 2 online techs that worked on getting my new TiVo working.