W.O.W. → Congrats WOW You're going to make the news

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Hope they run with it more than saying a fiber was cut and will be fixed. Besides that isolated issue with the fiber they should still cover the last few months of beyond crap.

Dearborn Hills down for 12+ hours, and with the bundle, no cable, no phone, no internet. Since we have to have a microCell for cell service, we can't even use our cell phone! This is a safety issue - what's that 911 service fee for? WOW seems to be really trying to go out of business. Absolute best to absolute worst in a few months. Sorry to see it, but we are actively pursing equivalent service, as long as it's not Comcast.

internet-stuff - jeebus, I get a meg a minute up to the limit.

TV - I dunno what's going on there, but the general idea is that the TV doesn't turn into pixelated shit twice a day.

"I'll throw all the TV's out of the upstairs-most-window...maybe that'll work!"

Fix it, and quickly. Please.

Well a news broadcast won't do much good if nobody is able to watch it. WOW! will probably scramble Fox 2 news for the SE Mich area. Fox was hosed last night for hours along with most of my other channels just like everyone else.

Get your heads out of your asses and fix the problem(s) already.

wow WOW

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Does WOW! use IPTV unlike conventional cable companies? If not, that engineer is blowing a lot of smoke up someone's you know what.

High usage on the internet frequencies will NOT cause pixelation on tv channel frequencies.

Actually, yes it will. Digital cable is really just a data stream. It is packetized data. There's really little difference in the way the TV signal and internet data are transmitted, other than that the TV is being broadcast continually and is a 1 way protocol.
Because of the similarity, cable companies can save a lot of money by having a single set of hardware that handles transmission of everything.

Saving a lot of money isn't worth pissing off your entire customer base. Whatever it is that is insufficient or lacking needs to be addressed. None of the other companies are having these same issues. Up till a few weeks ago I had U-Verse and the service was fine, I switched because I like WOW! or at least I like the memory of what WOW! used to be. My neighbor has Comcast, he hasn't had any issues for as long as he can remember. Whatever it is, fix it already.

Saving money has nothing to do with the problems customers have experienced. It's not like this was something brand new that they just installed. It's merely a configuration issue. I work in IT, and I've seen this type of thing happen a number of times. You rebuild/redesign a system/network to make it more robust and perform better, but it's difficult to anticipate everything. You have load problems and you spend a few days or weeks (or god forbid, longer) optimizing and retuning everything. I imagine they're going through the same sort of thing.

no actually it does not affect digital cable as they are on two totally different frequency and each 6MHz slice of spectrum is modulated separately at the headend and then combined on the fiber at the headend but they are still independent frequencies once the light from the fiber is converted to Radio frequencies.

Wxactly!!

Now answer this: Where does this data (both internet data and digital TV data) exist BEFORE it is modulated into its little slice of spectrum? Qxactly!!

You think WOW transmits all of this data internally, between all of thier different markets, in the form of pre-modulated 6MHz slices of spectrum? Even if every single one of their markets did have the exact same set of channels in the same arrangement, that still wouldn't be very practical.

No, but the internet traffic and the video traffic get separated out to different systems. Go do your research before you start spouting how things are done.

OK, sure genius. You are absolutely correct. Rather than just simply saying "we're sorry, we had some problems" and giving absolutely no technical explanation for it the way other cable companies do, WOW decided to go the extra mile and provide a completely made up technical explanation for how this happened.

And they did a really good job of making it a BS explanation that's completely plausible, since the results you see during the digital breakup are EXACTLY what happens when you have A/V packets transmitted over a bandwidth saturated network. I know that because I have RTP streams running on my home network, and when I accidentally saturate the network I get the same results. And I actually wrote some of the DTV/cablecard processing code for mythtv (a popular open source DVR), so I've done quite a bit of work with DTV streams at the MPEG-TS packet level, and the results I've seen to the DTV stream from this digital breakup looks exactly like what happens when I saturate the network. So again, they did a FABULOUS job of picking a fake excuse. But WTF do I know.

But the real question is, what is the real explanation that WOW is carefully trying to cover up? They're embarrassed that a Comcast employee infiltrated their workforce and sabotaged their systems? The seemingly-random digital breakup actually contains a carefully crafted mind control signal that WOW is inserting at the demand of the government? WOW is actually run by the Dukes, and they've placed a $1 bet over how fast they can destroy an award winning cable company? Seriously...even if you can come up with a more plausible explanation for how this could happen (which I haven't seen you do), what would be their incentive to outright lie about it rather than just stay quiet?

That's good advice from Ruth Spencer to contact the BBB and start filing complaints. Maybe that will get their attention?

I doubt a BBB complaint is going to be of much use. They have no real power to do anything. BBB complaints are mostly useful for taking a small, individual problem and bringing it to the attention of others who check the BBB, and thus the company has an incentive to resolve a problem they otherwise might ignore. In the case of WOW, this was a major problem, and they are certainly losing lots of customers over this. Not resolving a problem this significant is going to have devestating effects on the company. I'm sure they have every intention of fixing this, and lighting a fire under them is not going to improve things much. For a cable TV company, nothing you could do to them would come even close to the effects of them being unable to provide watchable prime time TV on any station.