FIOS Woes II

FIOS is doing better. I was told the guy would be here between 8 and 12. The woman on the phone I made the appointment with said I was the first appointment so he'd probably get there between 9 and 9:30. I wondered if that was the first appointment why it was 8-12. He showed up at 8:45, my landlord's son was already here.

We showed him the work for 10 mins. FIrst in my apartment and then in the basement. I went back up stairs, he told my landlord's son he was going to get something, and he left! I saw him drive away, told and the son, he figured he was getting something from the truck, but no he drove away.

He came back 35 mins later, sat in the truck for 10 mins, probably checking something on the phone or laptop. He worked the basement, converting from using the cat5 wire from the ONT to using coax. The apartment has coax wired to 3 jacks and there's a splitter right by the panel, like what you could buy at Radio Shack. He wired the coax from the ONT to the splitter and replaced the splitter. I asked and he said they put theirs on because they have to be two-way for the on-demand services. I'm not sure that really matters but ok.

He came into my apartment with the router that was downstairs over the weekend. The first thing was to get that working up here. He connected it but it couldn't quite get an internet connection. He called into the office and was on the phone and we waited about 20 minutes but it came up. He then upgraded the firmware I thought to the latest version (4.0.16.1.45.160) but I found out after that he went to the older (4.0.16.1.45.120) rev. After that it was fine and my laptop, HDTiVo and AirPort express all connected just fine.

He went out to his truck and drove away. I can understand if you need to pick something up, but isn't it rude not to say something to the customer? And he left me with no internet or tv service. Fortunately this time he was back in 10 minutes. Next we moved to Television. He had a set-top box for the bedroom TV and two cable cards fro the HDTiVo in the living room. In spite of the fact I previously told several people to make sure he brought some extras, he only brought two. He did the bedroom first.

I have a small TV there with my old (series 1) TiVo. I don't use it much except I sometimes go to the sleep with the TV on the sleep timer. If I have family over sometimes someone will want to watch something else in there. I didn't have a cable box there because the basic analog channels that the TV and TiVo can decode is fine. A difference I found with FIOS is that they send far fewer channels over as analog, about 15. Since I sometimes go to sleep with The Daily Show on, I asked for a set-top box there.

There was a splitter on the coax line there between the TV and TiVo. That threw him because he needed to adjust the signal in the basement based on how many splitters there were. I said it's ok, just eliminate the splitter and I'll connect the TiVo myself. He connected it and gave me a free power strip. It takes about 20 mins for the set-top box to initialize.

On to the cable cards. It went basically pretty smoothly, both cards worked. The Comcast guys connected them and called the office to read in the numbers to people to activate them in their system. Verizon instead has the tech use a website so it went quicker. I had forgotten about getting an 161-4 error message during the intsall but remembered that it was benign. This page is the most useful site for TiVo cable card setup. I made sure that regular and HD channels worked on both cable cards.

So everyone left by 12:30. I did the TiVo Guided Setup to teach it about the new channel number assignments. That went smoothly and I was really impressed that the TiVo remembered all my season passes and moved them to the new channels. I expected to have to re-enter them.

So what's the first thing I do? I tune to CNN to see if there's a verdict in the Libby trial. I have problems receiving CNN, it's pixelated and cuts in and out. Other channels seem to work fine. Was Verizon trying to get me to watch FOX News? I tried in teh bedroom and it was fine.

I remember seeing something about this online. The HDTiVo has a signal strength meter. I went through every channel and found 8 that had problems (51, 52, 60, 64, 80, 81, 163, 227). I found this thread that said some people had these problems and it varied over time. It also suggested that the signal strength might be high and adding an inline attenuator to lower the signal might help. I thought this might be easier then having them come out again.

I search online on radio shack and home depot but they didn't list them. They are close by so I went over. Neither had them though the guy at Home Depot thought it might work and told me that with different length runs of coax it can be hard to get it right. The living room is the shorter run so that fit too. So I went to nearby You-Do-It Electronics and picked up a 6db one up for $4. I installed it and it seemed to work. All 8 channels worked with a signal strength of about 94, the other channels were 97.

I was happy, so I started writing this post. By the time I got to this part CNN is pixelating again and not coming in at all. The same 8 channels fail and the others seem to work fine. Sigh, another call to FIOS. I called and went through their automated system. I was fairly impressed that it said it could test the line and it was fine and that it could reset my set-top box. Since the problems were with cable cards I said no and asked for an agent. As I was explaining the problem to him everything started working fine. So I don't know if the system reset something, if it was a temporary problem or just a gremlin. For now, it seems to be working.

Update: 5 minutes later the problem on the same channels came back. I called FIOS and they tried some things including reinitializing the cable cards but no luck. I'm reading the TiVo forum thread mentioned above and am trying to see what the issue is. FIOS offered to send someone out tomorrow, but I want to do more research before calling my landlord again.