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banditws6
Shrinking Time and Distance
Premium Member
join:2001-08-18
Frisco, TX

1 edit

banditws6

Premium Member

Two S-cards here!

The effectiveness -- and the resulting customer experience -- with CableCARDs is completely dependent on the local cable company. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: cable companies don't want to bother supporting these things, so they don't train their staff and don't set up their systems properly. As a result, customers have a bad experience and don't want the CableCARDs either. The cable company says, "Shucks, nobody wants these things, I guess we shouldn't put any money into supporting them." A vicious circle.

I have two Scientific Atlanta PowerKEY cards in my TiVo HD, and I have a serious love/hate relationship with them. I love them because they enable me to avoid having to deal with one of Sci Atlanta's absolutely horrible cable boxes. (Been there, done that.) But I hate them because our local Comcast's billing system isn't set up to deal with them properly, making the account prone to accidental misconfiguration by uninformed CSRs, which results in unexpected loss of service.

Because our local Comcast system's billing system is literally unable to support proper pricing for CableCARDs in a two-tuner device, they see each tuner as a separate box and bill for an additional HD outlet. Thus, a manual discount code must be put on the account to reduce the price to the correct level. This probably could be mitigated by using a multi-stream CableCARD instead of two single-streams, but Comcast won't offer the M-cards in my area.

I just had a technician sent out to my home to diagnose a problem with my Comcast HSI and we were talking about CableCARDs. "I hate them," he said. "CableCARDs and I don't get along. That's because we're installing them with no training at all, and when I take a stack of twelve of the damn things I'll be lucky if I find two that work."

The idea is great, the execution by southwest Florida Comcast is emphatically not.

Conversely, however, my dad has Bright House cable in metro Detroit, got a multi-stream Motorola CableCARD for his TiVo HD and has never had a single problem. Ever. (I'm jealous.)

Ebolla
join:2005-09-28
Dracut, MA

Ebolla

Member

said by banditws6:

Because Comcast's billing system is literally unable to support proper pricing for CableCARDs in a two-tuner device, they see each tuner as a separate box and bill for an additional HD outlet. Thus, a manual discount code must be put on the account to reduce the price to the correct level.
This MAY be true in your area, in most if a second card is in the same piece of equipment then there is a reduced cost for second card. Has been like that in New England area for a few years.

banditws6
Shrinking Time and Distance
Premium Member
join:2001-08-18
Frisco, TX

1 edit

banditws6

Premium Member

Edited above sentence to mention that. I did mention the specific local service area in several other places up there.

I think part of it may have to do with us being a Scientific Atlanta service area -- which represents about 10% of Comcast's markets, if I recall correctly.

If nothing else, this merely illustrates my point that the CableCARD experience is dependent upon the effectiveness of the local cable operation.