One of my U-verse boxes went to shit and A.T.&T. is shipping me a new one.
I got an email that said " Your new equipment is on the way and should be arriving soon. There’s no need to return your old equipment. Please visit att.com/recycle for details about how to recycle or sustainably dispose of your old electronics."
I don’t see anywhere that says I can’t sell it. Like I said, not that I’m going to. But I wonder if someone somewhere wouldn’t want it for something. What’s the Dope on the legality of selling it?
I don’t know any laws about it, but I do know I’ve seen them sold at thrift stores. Presumably that would be just as illegal.
If it has any sort of cable card embedded into it, I suspect it would be deactivated. So I don’t really see much reason why the company would care if it were sold. The big problem would be whether or not whoever bought it could actually use it for anything, even if it were a working model.
Back when I had cable, I recall the cable company “renting” me the box and charging me like $5 a month for the privilege of using it, added to my monthly bill. And I had to return the box when I cancelled.
If they told you there is no need to return it, then I suppose you are free to do with it what you like.
I worked in cable for many years (though have not been in the industry since 2017), and it is unlikely that a used box would work on the buyer’s system, even if it was the same provider as yours, at least without a lot of haggling with the operator to get it added to the provisioning database.
We used to collect the older, returned boxes and sell them to operators in emerging markets as sets, with the “headend” equipment that controls the boxes. There is a huge business in refurbishing boxes for redeployment by the vendor (I’ve been to the DirectTV refurb facilities, for satellite boxes). Also been in many discussions of when to finally deprecate a specific model of box - if a box still works, and they can bill for it, they’re happy to keep collecting on a fully-depreciated asset.
If ATT is saying to pitch it, it is probably no longer compatible with their network, or anyone else’s.