Cable TV queston.

[wake]

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Greetings from Thailand. I subscribe to an old style analog co-axial cable system and the head end is about 25 miles away. It costs about $10 per month. There are 50 channels available but only 12 have English language programing.

A couple of the channels come in crystal clear... perfect. The rest vary from moderate snow to totally unwatchable.

When I complain, a tech guy comes out and says there must be a bad connection and they replace the wire to the street. No improvement.

My question is: Don't the two or three crystal clear channels prove the cable itself is OK? How can a loose/corroded connection affect channels differently?

Thanks for your time.


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[jagabo]

While it's possible a bad cable can effect different frequency bands differently (VHF vs. UHF, for example) since they've already replaced the cable that shouldn't be an issue. Another possibility is noise being injected somewhere along the signal path. With properly shielded RG6 cable that shouldn't be a problem either. It's most likely there is something wrong at their end. Maybe they are receiving a bad OTA signal and just retransmitting it -- but don't want to admit it.

[johnmeyer]

I had this same problem for over a dozen years, back in the 80s and 90s. It is the signal that is injected at the head end. Everything is modulated together at that point, and there is no way for specific channels to individually degrade. The local repair person has only a limited number of things he or she can do, so they do what they can. I also had the cable to my house replaced. It did actually provide a very small improvement, but it was on all channels.

The bad news is that twenty years later we still have nothing but 20-30 analog SD channels, and no Internet and no digital TV. Hopefully your system will be upgraded some day. I'm still waiting for ours to enter the 21st century.

[Cornucopia]

2 words, johnmeyer: satellite dish.

Scott

[johnmeyer]

2 words, johnmeyer: satellite dish.

Scott

Scott,

Yes, you are absolutely correct. We have 206 homes in our community and all but three of them went to Dish or DirecTV back in the late 1990s. I did too. Then, about eight years ago, AT&T started providing TV and fast Internet over their old telephone wires. They call it Uverse. It took them awhile to find a copper pair that was still in good enough shape (they were installed in the 1960s), but once we got that straightened out, I get really good TV and reasonably fast Internet (20 Mbps).

Uverse is actually better than cable or satellite because of its unique architecture: I have a dedicated line to the central office and when I change a channel, it is done back there. This is the "secret" of how they are able to get hundreds of channels because, unlike satellite or cable, Uverse only delivers one single channel to my house at any moment in time which requires very little bandwidth. By contrast, the other technologies multiplex all of the hundreds of channels together and the medium has to be able to carry all of these simultaneously. This requires three to four orders of magnitude more bandwidth, which is a huge technical hurdle. Ultimately cable and satellite max out on what they can carry, but the Uverse architecture can carry an infinite number of channels.

My channel change is almost instantaneous, just like old OTA analog channel changing, which makes "channel surfing" a real joy. I also can get all sorts of "multiviews" where I can see multiple channels on the screen at once, sort of a PIP on steroids. Finally, I get great on demand options because, with their architecture, on demand TV is just another channel that they deliver.

So yes, I did abandon the lousy cable channel a long time ago.

[wake]

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Geez. I wish I had the options available in the west. Satellite packages that include western content are pretty expensive. THANK YOU all for your input!

wake (himself)

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