Thursday, January 01, 2009

Comcast CableCARD, Finally Success

A few days ago, I mentioned how Comcast wasn't able to install my CableCARDs the first time around. Two days and several hours with the Comcast guy later, I finally have working CableCARDs.

I was expecting Comcast to come back out on Tuesday to fix the problem, but ended up getting a call saying that they were having problems with all CableCARDs and not just mine. But, what was even weirder that shortly after my blog post, a Comcast rep posted a comment asking to help. That's just too Big Brother stalker-like.

Anyways, Comcast showed up on Wednesday and spent the better part of two hours trying to get it all working. First, I found out that the beginning of the serial numbers on the CableCARDs matched their digital boxes and that's why it wasn't working initially. Next came the configuration of the cards. This is what took forever. The cards have to be paired to my device (TiVo) and in order to do that, the billing department needs to know a few numbers on the cards. Ok, great. Do it.

To make a long story short, all of the channels didn't show up on one card but they did on the other. Once we get that working, they forgot to setup my HBO. This takes a while, too. I'm leaving a lot out because it was so mind numbingly boring. You'd think they'd be able to know what the deal was, but in reality the Comcast guy said they don't have much experience with CableCARDs. I guess it didn't help that the Comcast guy hated the cards to begin with.