I don't want Comcast cable boxes. Do I need them?

harshpencil

Sorry if these are n00b questions. I did search unsuccessfully for answers.

I have a year old small Samsung HDTV in my bedroom, a ceiling mounted projector in my movie room hooked to a separate TV tuner, and am about to buy one additional HDTV in my den. Right now I have Comcast internet and basic ($10 a month) cable. For the small HDTV and the projector, I have no cable boxes hooked up. The cable goes right into the TV (for the small HDTV) or the TV tuner (for the projector) and works fine. I get about 30 stations, including the standard OTA HDTV stations (2.1, 2.2, 4.1 and so on).

Now I want to upgrade to "standard digital cable" so I can get things like the History Channel, ESPN and so forth. I was told by the Comcast guy today I would need a comcast box for each TV. In fact, he said if I "upgraded" to "standard digital cable", but didn't rent the boxes, I would no longer be able to get the OTA HDTV by directly hooking up the cable, since they would be "remapped" to numbers over 100 and standard digital cable only gets you channels 100 and lower.

Does this sound correct? It's hard to imagine paying for an upgrade and actually losing channels. I assume I have QAM in both current tuners and would make sure to get it in any new TV.

I hate these damn boxes. They're big, ugly, hard to use and expensive. Do you think I really need them?

deadhead68

Unless Comcast in your area is different than here in the Chicago market, the Comcast rep gave you bad information. I have one of the upper tier Digital packages and I have a QAM tuner that still gets my locals in HD; 2.1, 5.1, 7.1, etc.

DeadHead68

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harshpencil

Thanks. I'm in the Twin Cities. I might just pick up my little TV, bring it over to a neighbor's house and see what happens.

bicker

Either already, or soon, it is likely that all expanded basic channels will require decryption. Federal law mandates that service providers support a separable security scheme that allows customers to use their own host equipment. In order for your equipment to qualify, it must support CableCARD. Very few televisions do, and only a couple of DVRs. So unless you already have compliant equipment, you're going to have to either buy new equipment, or rent equipment from the service provider, to bring yourself into compliance with the customer side of what the federal regulations call for.

Again, this is not the case everywhere, yet, for Comcast, but it is the case already for most of Comcast's competitors, and will be the case for Comcast, most everywhere, soon.

zip2play

Yes, Comcast makes pretty sure you do.

I tried as long as possible to avoid THE BOX but over a period of a year Comcast encrypted most of the cable chanels and thus to get what you are BUYING you must rent a box unless you want to stick with the most basic of basic setups with a dreary picture on many channels. For me, the Comcast HD box is $10/mo. extra for the first set and MORE for a second (strikes me as goofy, but that's how it is.) Very little of the QAM's is left unencrypted...basically just the local channels, because that's what the law demands.

With the HD box you get some extras like many cable channels in HD (Sci Fi, AMC, TBS, CNN, etc.) rather than just the OTA's.

But very quickly that $10 Basic become $50 Standard.

bicker

"$10 basic" only includes over-the-air broadcast channels, one signal from each (broadcaster's choice) must be provided in-the-clear. There is no need for a separate box to receive those channels.

JB Antennaman

Here is what Comcast did to my neighborhood.

Back in January they had a recruitment of new customers.

They offered a package deal for X amount of dollars, they gave you basic cable service - the local programming - channels 2 - 13.

You had your "High Speed Internet", connection speed 36 MBPS

You also had a phone service with unlimited long distance and local calling.

I believe that it was for around $99 a month for a one year agreement.

Dad figured that he would get it, because he had dial up internet which required him to have a second phone line. The internet was $50 for 3 months and the phone was $25 a month and he was going to loose his Pittsburgh market television stations due to the digital transition which took place back in June. He lives outside the service contour map area.

So he figured - $17 a month for internet, $25 a month for basic phone service, $69.00 a month for the Dish Network. At $99 a month, he was going to be ahead of the game.

For 2 months, he waited for his first bill to come in. After a while, he became paranoid and started calling the Comcast to inquire about the bill and how much it was really going to cost. The Comcast people kept putting him off, because after 3 months, you were locked into their rate for the entire year.

The next thing they did was slow down the internet, which caused people to complain about the lack of speed in their service.

Dad is 73 years old and does a lot of downloading and web surfing and also produces his own compact disc's with church music that he sang years ago.

So like a dummy, dad got on the phone and started to complain. Their advice is that there is probably something wrong with something in your lines. Dad went out and bought several routers and other devices and replaced all the wiring in the house and still no high speed service.

Then they come back and say - "oh - so I see you have the basic package. What you really need is our better package - which gives you a higher speed"!

Basically at that point, dad knew it was the old bait and switch and he hung up the phone.

The next thing they did was remap the local channels and tell him - "now if you want to watch the local weather, you need to rent a box off us".

Again, dad told them to stick their box where the sun don't shine.

So we spent $100 on a new antenna and another $200 for a pre amp and wire to wire it all up, so he can watch the Pittsburgh channels for free - the way god and Philo Taylor Farnsworth intended.

Today, after much controversy, the local newspaper wrote this article.

PUNXSUTAWNEY — Fran Bradley, vice-president of government affairs for Comcast, attended Monday’s Punxsutawney Borough Council meeting to answer many questions from council members regarding the recent changes on the local cable outlet.
Comcast had been invited to attend the meeting to better explain the confusion of the migration of the Pittsburgh television channels from their traditional locations of two, four, seven, 11 and 13.

“With the digital transition that has been going on throughout the cable television industry, no channels have been taken away,” Bradley said. “They may have been moved to a digital platform, but they haven’t been moved from that level of service.”

Bradley said even though those Pittsburgh channels are not in their traditional locations — Channels 2 through 13 — they are still available on “basic” cable service, but now require a digital coverter box in order to view them.

Bradley said with all the advanced services that Comcast has added — such as higher speed Internet connectivity, large volume of high definition programming and digital-on-demand programming — it was in need of more bandwidth space.

“All of those products and services take up bandwidth,” he said. “We started to take some of the analog bandwidth that is being utilized in the lower channels anywhere between two and 70 and moving them to a digital platform.

“We did not change the level of service they were on,” he said. “People do need a digital device in order to receive those channels.

“The recent migration of channels that we went through in the beginning of August is not the end of it,” he said. “There will be additional channels that will be migrated.

“What we will end up with is the only channels that will be in a true analog format will be basic service, the local broadcast channels.

“I realize some people were upset because they thought they could no longer see the Pittsburgh television channels,” he said. “This area is considered to be the Johnstown-Altoona television market. Even though Pittsburgh channels were being brought into this area, they are considered out of market.”

A letter Comcast sent to municipalities and customers stated that a digital device would be required on each television set once the migration occurred.

http://www.punxsutawneyspirit.com/co...view/197944/1/

bicker

Blame the FCC (and perhaps Nielsen Media) for sticking your father in the Johnstown-Altoona television market. Comcast has no vote about that, and they are required to provide primacy to the affiliates in the Johnstown-Altoona television market. Customers reward service providers more for providing more different services than duplicates of existing services.

JB Antennaman

Well, here is the thing. I tell people about the history of the area and the subject of television and they don't want to listen.

The very first station in the area was Dumont - WDTV - Dumont Television. Dumont had a 100% market share in this area. When you turned on your television, you watched their station and when you were done watching television - you turned it off.

The second station to come along, which just had it's 60th birthday is WJAC in Johnstown. WJAC is a super station - 5000 Kw

The people in my area put up antenna's to watch WDTV and then bought the TENNA rotor to turn their antenna's towards Johnstown in 1949 when they first came on air.

At the same time, television hobbyist's in Pittsburgh bought large aerials and Tenna Rotors and turned their antenna's towards Johnstown - so they could have variety. Like I said, Dumont had the only station in town and Pittsburgh at that time was something like the 16th largest market in the USA.

Westinghouse wanted to get into the television business - but there was a freeze on licenses - because there was not enough bandwidth available and they wanted to make sure that when they approved a full power license that it would not interfere with the other surrounding stations. That is the reason why WTAE in Pittsburgh is limited in power and it's stations antenna had a tilt away from Cleveland - because if it ran full power - during the summertime the two would have conflicts.

There was only 12 available channels and you had to keep a space between the channels to keep the stations from bleeding over each other.

KDKA - Westinghouse strong armed Dumont into selling them his license and they were on channel 3 and then moved back to channel 2. In the grand scheme of things - the best channel for long distance reception and the worst channel for interference from weather and tropo reception of other stations hundreds of miles away.

WTAE - channel 4

WJAC - channel 6

WWCP - channel 8

WTAJ - channel 10

WIIC - WPXI - channel 11

WQED - channel 13

Add in channel 3 WPSU - Penn State PBS and Channel 16 - which was Pittsburgh PBS and you had a full house.

All people in my area had to do was buy a 150 mile VHF / 60 mile UHF antenna and they could receive - to one point or another - all the stations listed here.

So people came to trust things like Joe Denardo weather on WTAE or Patti and Daddy ( Bill Burns) on KDKA for their news.

With the DTV transition, they took away most of the ability to receive most anywhere those programs - on channel 2 and 4.

People with no knowledge of digital television and unwilling to spend money to put up a antenna and pre amp - just for the sake of MAYBE being able to receive those stations - gave up and just paid the cable bill.

Now the cable company told dad that he had to pay for his box, because he was on a cheaper package and they couldn't afford to just give him the box for free for the first year.

The same story as with the low speed internet. If you want more channels, you need to improve your package.

The deceptive - deceitful practices of a company - just to gain a few subscribers - is not what you want to do this day and age with a sagging economy and in a community where 60% of the community is retired and collecting social security. 10 to 15% are on public assistance and another 10% is unemployed due to the economy or lack of jobs in the local area.

That means that 15% of the entire population in the area is paying to keep the other 85%.

You can't run a business where 85% of the income is being ate by the the people who are not working.

If Comcast wanted to sell subscriptions to sucker people to hook up to the cable, they should have been willing to loose a little money in the short term to try to gain customers in the long run. Not tell them one thing to sucker them in and then put hidden charges in their bill somewhere down the road and say - if you want it - you will pay me for it. When you subscribed - it was supposed to be all a part of the package you subscribed to.

Comcast had a program on their servers that knew when you were downloading pictures or music and were starting and stopping the connection to disrupt the download -so you would call and complain and upgrade your service.

That is the first thing that my dad complained about. It works the first couple of weeks and then it starts and stops more frequently and when you complain - they are told to offer to upgrade your service for a fee, to get you to pay for what you originally thought you were going to get for the $99 package deal!

bicker

This whole first 2/3 of your message has nothing to do with cable television, and is therefore off-topic.

So partial blame goes to the FCC for not helping people understand the DTV transition, and the rest of the blame there goes to the people, themselves, for not taking responsibility for educating themselves, and for being unwilling to do what would best serve their own needs.

If your father wants someone to give him value, then he should be content to pay for that value.

If you want more, you pay more. This is simple consumer math.

First, the only deception/deceit I see is how you're perverting reality to try to make the company look bad. Consumers want to pay less. Of course. That's not earth-shaking news. Trying to make that want sound like something that it is not is dishonest.

Second, community standards set the accommodations and consolations offered to folks who are retired and collecting social security. In that regard, basic cable is provided at a very low rate, often lower than cost. As a matter of fact, expanded basic, which is what it sounds like you're insisting your father should have, actually may be subsidizing the low rates charged for basic cable. Expanded basic is not what is intended to serve that societal standard you're trying to assert; that's what basic service is for.

Election Day is in November.

Who's eating whom?

There is no such thing as "gaining customers in the long run". Customers who are not under contract can switch to the competitors at any time. So what Comcast needs to do, just like all of their competitors, is attract the most lucrative customers, even attracting the most lucrative customers requires that less lucrative customers are unable to afford the more valuable, advanced services.

If you signed a term contract, then Comcast will comply with the terms of the contract, until the contract is complete. If you chose to leave your options open, and therefore you could switch to a competitor at any time, then it is unreasonable to expect that Comcast will never change their offerings. That's irrational.

What a ridiculous way to refer to a bandwidth cap imposed only on the super-heavy users. And I find it hard to believe that your father was downloading so much data that he encountered the bandwidth cap.

Utterly ridiculous... you're losing credibility the more you type.

Sykotic

If you feel that you were mislead or would like to complain to someone other than a customer service rep, contact your local cable board.

Always read the small print. Some providers do throttle users with excessive downloads.

Loves2Watch

One thing they don't seem to teach in marketing anymore is lifetime customer value. If they did and these companies truly understood the dynamics of such, they would practice business much differently.

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bicker

I spent the first part of my working life as an expert in the area of quality management and customer loyalty. The reason why I got out of that line of work is because it became clear that increasingly mass-market consumer loyalty was of no value to mass-market consumers business whatsoever. Mass-market consumers are hardly ever loyal to companies. They're not even loyal to quality service.

They can be loyal to low prices, though. That's pretty common.

Companies really do "truly understand" the dynamics of customer loyalty. We researched the issue very comprehensively, and perhaps the scary part for consumers it that consumers, as a group, were found out. What mass-market service providers do is the best indicator of what we found out. Now we all suffer from the fact that companies really do "truly understand" the dynamics of customer loyalty. We, as consumers, were better off when companies didn't know.

oblioman

Mass-market consumers are hardly ever loyal to companies. They're not even loyal to quality service.

100 percent pure bullshit. have you ever heard of a little company called John Deere??? Mass market,,high prices,,,high quality,,and a loyal customer base. To the original OP,,,do what bicker tells ya,,,,and dump comcast as fast as ye can. No loyalty, me arse.

bicker

Grow up. Your continue refusal to acknowledge reality is now bordering on idiocy.

Thanks for proving my point, and contradicting yourself, all in the same line of text.