Cable TV Channels MIA

Personal Finances Building / Maintaining a Home
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This ate up 4-5 hours earlier today… (Tuesday) with no real resolution.

Chased a headache with our Xfinity TV, we have 2 boxes, a DVR and a Remote, neither one will go to a few channels in the 78x range… Refresh, reboot, power cycled Web modem, TV boxes and TVs, replaced the DVR box (much smaller) & it’s remote, and nothing helped… All while on a live chat on screen… And no resolution… Was going to send a tech, but we have other plans, so if it’s broke later this month, I’ll see where to go then…

Pretty weird that only a few channels are affected, but I didn’t try 'em all… To me it points back at their end, so they escalated it there, see what happens…

The error (XRE-03062) seems to be a common error… (Cross platform Runtime Environment a platform-independent protocol for distributed applications…) Had to look it up!

Such fun…

Later on, I did find a workaround, Record the desired show/time, and that comes up just fine, if I forward past the commercials, it goes into Live mode… Proving the signal is there, so it has to be, it seems to me something on their servers messing up…

All part of our home maintenance, is why I posted this here…

weco

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Sorry to hear you are having problems with Xfinity. All I can offer is “welcome to the club”. We have problems with Xfinity all the time. Constantly rebooting. Voice out of sync with lips. Picture stuttering. You name it. After this last round of issues a technician came out to the house and completely rewired the cable. Helped for about a week but things are back to normal (Xfinity normal shall we say). For as much as the charge per month you would think we were watching TV on Hollywood Blvd. Yep, been there and done that many, many times with good old Xfinity.

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We just moved a few weeks ago and have found Spectrum at our new place even worse than Xfinity at our old. And for some reason almost every channel is repeated in the guide 3 or more times. I don’t get the reasoning behind that. More channels in the lineup, I guess. We also had dish for a couple of years and that was also worse than Xfinity. They are probably all bad, but I’m kind of missing my voice remote and having more than a single “last” channel.

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yep, we too have constant problems with Comcast - its the only service we can access here, sigh…we have one of their whole pkg deals, and now our landline phone is out for about the umpteenth time. They are clueless as to how to fix. Grrr…

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Well, our experience here has been good, actually, local Store folks helpful at time in finding discount deals, until I tired of the annual hassle and let it slide, I’m on their Triple Play package, but ignore the phone option, hang onto the at&t landline for full spam access, well E911 access, just in case of the need… Could drop it or flip it to either Comcast or as a 2nd iPhone SIM but, likely will just drop it at some point. We got hooked on HBO/Showtime, Sports, SciFi channels so pay the price.

Generally I’ve been able to Refresh, restart and recover from the rare errors… Prior to Comcast, we had Viacom take over our HOA’s underground cable TV, (no Web), they fixed some of it, then when Comcast took over they did a lot of work, reran new ‘drops’, new coax’s, new splitters, and it’s been solid, other than occasional lockups as they worked on local fixits… I own my own web modem, thanks to a Comcast support tech’s suggestion to avoid monthly rental fees…

And I’ve generally been able to make contact either online chats, or Store visits, never a problem swapping out boxes, new remotes, so this was a first in not getting a fix by either a box swap or then zapping it from their side. Outages, fairly rare, maybe 10-20 minutes, generally the TV side, once in a while both, but it comes back… I have a monitor app on my Mac toolbar called ‘autoping’ that tells me if the web link goes away, average ping time is 148ms… Says Failed if it’s down… Packet loss is only 1.6% over about 7 million pings, fastest 0.07ms… Anyway, web’s been good…

I do see a lot of complaints online, there is also a FB Group for complaints, but not so many fixes, and as some have noted, Spectrum, Dish, all have their issues… And I really hate their spam calls, won’t ever consider them…

Just checked, still broke…

Thanks for the replies, sorry we all don’t have solid setups, likely varies by location… Infrastructure! Fiber could be good, better, but then who to trust as a provider, the old Bell System days are slipping away… I had T’s DSL for a time, but they couldn’t match the speed of Comcast/Xfinity, gone…

weco

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I’d had great success with AT&T Fiber, for some 5+ years. Rock solid, with 2 very short outages. Just internet, no TV or phone service. TV is streaming, and phones are mobile.

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The Project Pronto, here in California & Nevada, wonder Pacific Telephone, fell apart, we, WeCo/LU had the contract, coordinating, supplying the acres, tons of materials, management all went down the tubes as the bureaucracy of every little of big town/city stalled the trenching, permitting, and Pacbell had seriously underestimated the trenching costs. Hazards of undocumented underground gas, electric, water, CATV lines was part of it… Acres of reels, NG gensets, other materials were scrapped… A couple new subdivisions were done, but not the overall project… And now, I doubt at&t has the willpower to try again… Last I heard was a large mesh wifi or similar network, avoiding the trenching, but I’ll only believe it when I see it…

Our cells are iPhones on Verizon, best coverage in all our wanderings, and I’ve actually installed a lot of their gear over the past working years of mine, the VZ techs were the savviest of all our customers, engineering continuing to grow their systems even with the telecom meltdown…

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UPDATE! As of just now, 12 Noon here, when I came back from picking up a great sandwich for lunch, the MIA channels are back working again! So they must have found something on their end, fixed it this morning. I had tried switching earlier today, but it was still broke… Magic! Just had to get the right eyes to look at it!!

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As things worked out, today my LG TV wanted to do an update, seemed to go well, but then, no picture, only the Comcast Welcome Bienvedo Bienvenue screen… Chased the normal, refresh , reboot, and even the live chat online… In the end replaced the box and it’s all back, just lost a few hours! Whew!

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He, he, he. You get the old Bienvedo screen too. I have seen that screen so many times I’ve lost count and every time I see it you can plan on losing 15 minutes of TV time. I’m not sure what Comcast/Xfinity’s business plan is but I suspect it has something to do with driving to the other side of town, trading in your box for another defective box and then watching the Bienvedo screen again. And to top it off I would be willing to bet you are probably getting the box your neighbor down the street just turned in. No refurbishing. No repairing the problem. Just stick some shrink wrap on it and the customer will be happy.

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Our Xfinity store is only a few blocks away, friendly help, same with the Verizon store, good, savvy folks… But in both, I’ve already done the basics, they just need to handle the paperwork…

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In the end, why does any of that matter, if it solves my problem? It just doesn’t matter where the replacement box, cords/remote came from or how it’s packaged! It’s fixed, no tech had to come into my home, I just had to go pick it up, set it up as I did originally.

That it failed is still a mystery, the original missing channels, then the bricked box, both the DVR and the remote boxes were several years old, are on 24/7, stuff happens…

Onward!

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[quote=“wecoguy, post:12, topic:77935”]
In the end, why does any of that matter, if it solves my problem?

Wonderful! I’m glad you are happy with the wonderful service Comcast/Xfinity provides. Have a nice day.

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