robison@eosp1.UUCP (Tobias D. Robison) (05/14/84)
References: I'm a new subscriver to this newsgroup; I hope this query is a new topic and of some interest. I would appreciate private replies and will summarize if they are interesting. We recently subscribed to HOME LINK cable (Princeton, NJ), which has the following pay channels available: Disney, HBO, Showtime, Bravo, Cinemax, The Movie Channel, Playboy. We subscribe to the "basic" 50 channel package plus showtime. HOMELINK suffers from a series of fascinating problems. My query is, how can I learn enough about how a cable service works to understand what causes these problems? Here are some examples: (1) All channels became "unauthorized". One time (due to a lightning storm?) was fixed quickly. The opther time we waited 12 hrs for the fix, and understood that people were havinbg this problem cirrected individually. (2) One "authorized" channel shows a religious network a few hours a day. The rest of the time it shows WHT, scrambled, with no sound. (3) One "authorized" channel that usually shows a test pattern showed cinenmax for a week, free to all customers (I assume). The shows appeared 3 hrs later than the scheduled times (I think of this as the "cinemax california feed"). (4) Several pay channels can be viewed, as all children in this town know, by selecting a particular channel and then turning the set's station selector to various wrong channels. (By the way, I suspect it is legal to do this, but don't know.) These unauthorized images were originally unscrambled, but gradually, over two months, have all been scrambled WITH SOUND (compare to WHT above.) Well, there is still one unscrambled channel that comes in with below-standard sound. (5) Another channel showed a service that looked like it might be a pay channel for a few days. I never got its ID straight. --------- Usually when I watch technological foulups, I can think of an approximate model of how the system works to account for these screwups. In the case of cableTV, I'd like to know what to read so I can understand how these things happen and take so long to correct. - Toby Robison (not Robinson!) allegra!eosp1!robison decvax!ittvax!eosp1!robison princeton!eosp1!robison