One CableCARD failing

[Imposter]

I'm with Time Warner Cable in New York City. After using the Series 3 happily for about a year with 2 cablecards, one of them started getting wonky. It wouldn't tune in any non-broadcast channels for longer than a few seconds. A service call to swap out the cards had to be cut short for time, but the technician confirmed our good signal strength and traded out the cards, but the problem persists. Cablecard 1 seems to be fine, but cablecard 2 has the problem. I think the original difficulty was with cablecard 1. After another card swap this upcoming weekend, all they are prepared to tell us is we should take it up with TiVo.

Does this sound like the TiVo is at fault or could it be a bunch of bad cablecards? Has anyone had a similar issue?

Thanks in advance.

-Imposter

[mbellot]

Let me start by saying I know nothing about the Series 3. :D

With that out of the way, is it possible to swap the cards from slot to slot? If you put the "never been a problem" card from slot 2 in slot 1 and start seeing problems I'd say thats a fairly good indicator.

You could also take the current "suspected flaky" slot 1 card and put it in slot 2. If it starts working without fail then you seem to have your answer as to which component (cable card or tivo) is actually the root of the problem.


If you can't swap the cards (remember my initial disclaimer) then just ignore me.

[Imposter]

Thanks for your quick reply. I guess the long version of the story is in order:
Number two was suspected to be the original bad card. In the first tech visit, the guy swapped out number two for a new one. At that point, I think the first card started exhibiting the problem but the second seemed ok. Honestly, I forget. We both decided it would be a good idea to swap the two cards to each other's slots to test. The result was that both behaved poorly.
Fast forward to a few days later when a supervisor came to take a turn. (I was not at home for this visit, so I forget some of the details as they were relayed to me.) The first thing he said was that the cards are authorized from the central office for a particular slot, so switching them with each other was a bad idea. He gave us a new card (just one, I think), and set it up properly, but the other remained troublesome. Then my wife had to kick him out because she was late for work. Our current setup is one working card and one non. The next Time Warner call is tomorrow morning.

Also, I just checked the cablecard diagnostic screen and finally saw that the "Tuner" does not correspond to the card I thought it did. I see that the one showing Tuner 0 says CableCARD 2, while the one showing Tuner 1 says CableCARD 1. So my original assessment was wrong; it was CableCARD 1 misbehaving.

So. Suggestions?

-Imp

[Imposter]

Everything is resolved as of today, many weeks after the first sudden bad behavior. I am posting the resolution so Time Warner customers will understand the problem, but this may apply for other cable providers, too.

The real problem was that our account had been set up for one set-top box and one cablecard, right from the start. We haven't had a set-top box since we got the new TiVo last year and got both cablecards at the same time. We'd just been lucky until now that the screwed up account information didn't affect our service. When it was discovered in the office (and presumably one of the cards was disabled without any notification to us, naturally), it caused one of the cards to stop working properly.

So all the tech visits we'd had since then were pointless as long as the error was in the account setup. In fact, these visits made the matter worse. When one clever guy at TWC saw the problem while I was talking to him on the phone, he was able to correct the account to show our two cablecards and no set-top box. (And there was a price increase, of course, since they claim the packages are only available for customers using the boxes, which sounds like complete BS to me. It doesn't say that anywhere on the website, for one thing. I can fight that fight later...)

It still took two more weeks for enough techs to visit and finally assign the proper cards to the proper host IDs (the TiVo slots). Finally, all I had to do was swap the stupid cards with each other, since they were assigned wrong at the office yesterday, but I didn't know that until the good foreman (the one from the second visit) returned today and we went through the setup carefully.

The tricky thing about this problem was the weird way it manifested, which is why I'm describing it here, again. With one card inserted, it worked fine. With the second card inserted, the first one went bad and the second worked fine. If anyone gets these symptoms, try checking to see that the account is properly set up (with two cablecards and no set-top boxes) before screwing with the cards.

Good night, and good luck.

-Imp