Federation output down until monday because of stupid ISP!!!

[Engineer]

Wife called yesterday evening and told me that Insight (cable company) had left an FCC notice on my door and had turned off our internet service. The notice said that we had too much "leakage" back into the cable lines and that they had to turn off the internet until they could go around the inside of the house and find and disconnect the source. I called and they said that they have thousands of customers off right now and it would take they a few days to get to mine....what a crock!!!!!

They say that they do this every year, but this year is especially heavy on offenders of the leakage . Anyway, I received a credit but I'm still p_ssed....they will probably try to give me crap about needing to pay for upgrades or that I'll have to remove PC's or something...who knows. Regardless, the 70 or so WU's per day won't happen again until they get the service back on. My queue has 10 days or so worth of units so everything should be good...assuming they don't try to shut something down.

Sorry...had to rant (I'm at work using internet here...hehe)!!!

Also, they just had to turn the damn thing off during the start of the SEC tournament (I'm a Big Blue Fan...also a grad )!!

Take care...have a good weekend...and GO TeAM (more...more...more! ) :Q

Go Big Blue (University of Kentucky Wildcats Men's Basketball - 16-0 in the SEC this year..wooooHoooo!!!)

 

[Confused]

Damn that sucks!


Almost as much as my 1gb/day download limit on my cable :| What the hell is the point in HAVING 1/2 mbit cable connection, which i specifically got to be able to use 24/7, how much I want, and have it capped to like 1 bloody GB per day :|


Well, I hope it all gets sorted out for you soon

 

[awal]

Originally posted by: Confused
Damn that sucks!


Almost as much as my 1gb/day download limit on my cable :| What the hell is the point in HAVING 1/2 mbit cable connection, which i specifically got to be able to use 24/7, how much I want, and have it capped to like 1 bloody GB per day :|


Well, I hope it all gets sorted out for you soon

dam that does suck - where do you live?

 

[Confused]

In the UK.

ntl (probably the biggest broadband ISP here) is introducing this 1gb/day transfer cap. I'm paying the extra for 600k down, over 128k down, so that, if the need arises, I can download more in one day (up to 6gb if needed). With this "cap", I can now only download as much as if i was on the slower (and cheaper) 128k service (yeah, they actually offer a 128kbps down "broadband" service

)

Seriously considering going to ADSL now (hopefully phone lines here can get it)

 

[awal]

i hope ISPs in America dont start to adopt this kind of daily cap... i dont download too much... i would say not more than 200MB a day, but if i signed up with the understanding that service was unlimited and then it was changed i would be pissed.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

That's why I have dsl, only as reliable as the carrier, and or local cable companies here suck when it comes to downtime.

 

[RaySun2Be]

The notice said that we had too much "leakage" back into the cable lines and that they had to turn off the internet until they could go around the inside of the house and find and disconnect the source. I called and they said that they have thousands of customers off right now and it would take they a few days to get to mine....what a crock!!!!!

Leakage? Back into the cable lines? What kind of BS is that? :|

Sounds like they just want an excuse to go looking around the house and determine if you have a network hooked up or not. :|

 

[mechBgon]

All together now...

dasm! :|

 

[Slaughter]

That indeed sounds like some BS but, but I think they may be referring to "leakage" as echos coming off of equipment in your home. I'm no cable television/interet expert, but I believe it can be caused by just about anything on your home wiring. I think it can also be caused by un-terminated cable jacks in the house, like wall plates that don't have a tv or anything plugged into them. I read that somwhere.....somtime.

 

[RaySun2Be]

Some info I found on Cable TV Leakage

Seems like the most common occurance is outside the homes. And the cable company is shutting down service and suffering customer impacts in order to avoid hefty FCC fines.

 

[Engineer]

Well, I'm back...but the d@mn leakage wasn't even inside my house...it was in their lines/filters/boosters between my house and their box! :|:|:|

So I went all SEC Tournament Weekend without internet because they had a bad component and blamed it on my house!!! :Q

Oh well...happy to be back!

more..more..more! :Q

 

[Baldy18]

Leakage is a very common thing and most of the time is the fault of the cable companies workers (I know because I work for one). It isn't the cable companies fault. No matter how much they try either their own workers or the workers of contractors they hire often do things that contribute to "leakage".

The most common offences are leaving ports on taps (on the pole or in pedestals) or splitters open. By not plugging them with a terminating resistor or a cable line (duh) rogue signals can seep in (or out), such as over the air radio or television broadcast signals. Also malfunctioning TVs can often send out a signal that many times can interfere with the upload signals of cable modems. These are example of how outside signals can leak into the cable and hurt the reception of your TV or modem. The artice that Ray pointed out does a great job of pointing out how signals can leak out and disrupt over air signal. Cable signal leaking out is probably their main concern since that is what can get them in trouble but they also want to keep outside signals out so that they can continue to provide quality service to their customers.

I myselft am very glad to hear that they perform an anual audit of such offences. It really is a minor inconvience compaired to the expense and time that it would take to fix problems if this type of thing were alowed to go on for long periods of time. Immage all the radio, TV, cable, cellular phone, and satellite companies fighting over who's fault it was because the air was congested and signals were all interfering with each other.:Q

BTW I just found out that my internet ISP lowered their rates by $30/month but were continuing to charge me the old rate.:|

 

[Smoke]

You didn't miss much. UK beat Mississippi State for the SEC Title. Ho Hum Nothing new.

 

[ProviaFan]

Sorry to hear about your IsP, Confused. If it makes you feel any better, a local IsP (notice the lower case status of the middle letter; consider that their "service" definitely doesn't need to be capitalized :|) which has always been rather crappy has now started offering satelite service. Bear in mind that this service requires a dialup connection (this area is rural, so 14.4Kbit/sec dialups are not uncommon), and the download rate is 400Kbit/sec. Now, what would you think if I told you the monthly download cap was 500MBytes. Five hundred fricking megabyes per month! I get twice that in one week just running my dialup connection (luckily I get 52kbit/sec connects rather reliably) overnight. :disgust:

Edit: It sure is amazing how quickly I can get off topic, isn't it? Yes, sorry to hear about your provider, too, Engineer. At least it was fixed, and now your SETI production can soar again.