The installer claimed they could, and they would charge me for any extra tv I hooked up. I’m not about to pay extra because I have a second tv in the bedroom. I can only watch one at a time, and of course I could always wheel that one around with me, so the extra charge would be for no additional service.
I don’t believe him for two reasons.
I don’t think the cable is a two-way path.
They allow me to connect a vcr and and disc player to the line, so any “extra load” would be masked by how many attachments I had running.
At the Sprint repair shop, they sucked the old address book out of my broken phone and poured it into my new phone.
Is this something civilians can do?
I’d just like to back it up from time to time.
I believe signal strength can be an indicator for them. In the past, my cable company was looking to troubleshoot signal loss and part of the process was connecting/disconnecting cable boxes to see which cable was flawed.
Never heard of them charging per television. I thought it was normal to charge per cable box. The installer may have been mistaken or you may have misunderstood him. Call the cable company help line and ask them directly.
Yes - the signal strength can be monitored but only when our technician is there in your home - the rest of the time, only the outgoing signals are monitored.
Now - if you report a weakened signal, and a tech shows up to investigate, he may at that point be able to determine that the time has been illegally split. And yes, it is illegal. It’s called “Theft of Service”
send me a private email and I’ll tell you some other stuff
Once upon a time, there was a separate per TV charge. That was stopped in the late '80’s. Now there’s a flat fee to cover premium programming all any/all additional outlets. Some companies have since waived this PPOF altogether, but others have not.
My parents’ house only has one cable box (digital cable) but three connections. That’s three physical jacks going into the house with one of them being connected to the cable box and the two others just from the wall to the TV with coax.
I think my dad is charged something like $.75/mo per extra jack. The cable company knows this because they installed the jacks, so there’s no fooling them.
How are you planning on connecting more than 1 tv to your cable line? If you have someone come out and install more jacks, THEN they know how many connections (jacks) you have. I bet that’s what the installer was talking about.
If you do your own splitting and install your own extra jacks then no I don’t think the cable company will be able to tell how many TVs you have hooked up to your cable. But once you need a service call and they see what you’ve done then they are likely to start charging you. Also they probably won’t service your own split lines.
you are allowed to do your own splitting with materials purchased from the cable company
that way you are assured they are up to code and able to carry the signal without degradation
My cable provider charges enough for TV and hi-speed internet to cover a lot of TV's.
They can and do see my cable modem when I have called the help desk with problems.
I have no reason to not believe they can determine how many TV’s are on at any one time and maybe how many are connecter.
Cable IS a two way path whether you choose to believe so or not.
I don’t have a cable box. I just have a cable coming into the house, through the wall to one tv. A few years ago, hearing that the cable company would charge extra for a second line, I split the thing myself and sent it into a different room for a second tv. The company has never claimed that I have two lines and has only charged me for one. I never saw how splitting the line could be considered theft of service. I’m paying for the signal that’s coming to my house. If I divert it to two rooms, I’m not getting MORE signal from the company. If anything, I saved them the cost of the 20 more feet of cable and the splitter that I installed. I’m sure they can’t detect that I have split that line - certainly not in the absence of any cable modem or box. Right?
We can not–nor do we have much interest–in seeing how many TVs you have connected. We can see your modem and converter box because they are electronic devices with mac addresses that the network is set up to monitor, but we really don’t have a way of seeing actual TVs hooked up. Measuring signal isn’t really effective or worthwhile, because lots of things other than TVs can cause signal levels to be off from what they should be. As someone else mentioned, if we go out for a service call to an individual house, a tech may have reason to believe there are more TVs in that house than on the work order based on signal, but you wouldn’t be absolutely certain without actually looking.
My company doesn’t charge for additional outlets any longer. The service contract used to specify that customers were not allowed to run their own outlets or split off our lines–it may still state that, I haven’t looked in a long time. I know it’s not really enforceable, but the reason it was there was to deter people from doing it themselves, because believe it or not a lot of people screw it up and then call us to come out and fix it. It was more a way for us to justify charging for the eventual service call-if we had installed the outlet, we wouldn’t charge to service it. People would install their own outlets with ridiculously old wiring and crappy splitters bought at yard sales.
I am not a cable employee, but just an annoyed customer (for 20+ years) from the outside looking in.
I never understood why an extra TV hooked up to cable was a “theft of service”…it would be no different than sharing the newspaper with everyone in the household, and probably has been used or pointed out in someone’s defense over the years. I’m glad most cable companies saw the idiocy in this, and chose to base it on just service to a d-mark in a single residential home.
I’ve wired my office building myself with cable, cat5 and cat3(phone) wires with multiple jacks throughout my building (about 40 jacks total containing all 3 stub-outs) and that was for convenience sakes of placing 1 tv, 8 computers and 8 phones throughout the building with versitility in mind; not for 40 tvs, 40 computers and 40 phones. The same reasoning can be used here for installing multiple cable jacks throughout a house.
I guess if you are really “worried” that someone can see that you have 2 TVs hooked up from a cable jack, just use a good A/B switch since you only need one TV running at a time. But then as others have pointed out, I don’t think it’s as big as a problem now. The bigger problem is the theft of premium channels by tinkering with the cable boxes or chips or running an outside line to your neighbors cable service. That may explain the scare tactics that some cable companies use to get people to not add a second TV (cable jack) in their own house in order to curb the actual theft of cable from a neighbor or the main cable access line.
I had a friend who worked for a cable company, on several occasions he found connections wired up with cable jacks on opposite sides of a common wall between two apartments so both apartments were connected to the same outside line. This kind of arrangement is very easy to do if you are already pulling cable and have a friendly neighbor. I was under the impression that this type of thing, or just a second box charge (i think its another $5 for us if we wanted it) to add a neighbor, is what they are trying to avoid/discourage. With a little creative wiring and an extra $15-$20 a month I could be selling discount cable to 3-4 apartments around me.
Anecdotal evidence here. My cable company is Adelphia, and the tech recently came out to install an HD box for me. He noticed my splitting of the analog signal (to 3 TVs) and tut-tutted, telling me that in theory I’m supposed to pay for extra TVs, but he’d “pretend he hadn’t seen anything”.
Of course, IME Adelphia is a pretty awful cable company anyway, so other companies may be more reasonable.
yes - the subscriptions seem pricey - i won’t get into what the various premium services charge the cable providers but when it goes up the cable rates have to go up to cover what the cable companies pay to the premium services. A lot of people don’t realize that the cable company has NOTHING (let me repeat that: NOTHING) to do with the programming on the various channels.
yes -there is two way communication with the modems and with the converter boxes, but ***NOT * ** with cable ready TVs that are hooked directly to the incoming cable (with or without a vcr or dvr)
The ONLY ways for the cable company to know how many TVs are hooked up is [ul]
[li]for the cable company to do the hook ups[/li][li]for the customer to do it and tell the cable company[/li][li]from an on site inspection generated by a reported service problem[/li][li]for a vicious neighbor to tattle on you[/li][/ul]
If you’re not in the industry, please do not make assumptions
That would be a bad assumption. They can use a piece of test equipment called a time-domain reflectometer to see if you have split the cable and added additional loads. They can do this from outside your residence. They can produce a good map of your signal distribution network without having to physically inspect it.
an unauthorized split of an existing line may weaken the signal to all other sets in the house. If you are in a two or three family dwelling, it may affect other residents. If that happens, they will complain, a tech will come out, the unauthorized split will be discovered, and the perpetrator will be held accountable - anywhere from simply paying for proper installation (around $30 US here) to a severe fine and/or jail time. Here is the FCC document detailing the offense and the punishment
The local cable company (which eventually became Comcast) would do sweeps of neighborhoods looking for signal leaks. They really didn’t care if you split your own signal within your own home. They were finding that people were climbing utility poles and tampering with the junction boxes (splitting existing signals, getting free service or HBO, etc). Not only was this illegal, it was stupid and dangerous.
A friend lived in a duplex. He noticed his cable looked like crap one day and called the cable company. Turns out the neighbor had gone under the house and hacked (literally, the guy butchered the lines) my friend’s line in order to split it to his house.
