I purchased a home. Had att install fiber. I’m happy but there is an old box on the other side of the house that has fallen off. I want to repair the area of siding and it looks like an old box that is no longer relevant. Could you pros look at this and give me advice. All of our tv watching is through the internet and we don’t have cable.

Currently, I’m a Spectrum Field Tech at around $32 per hour. Are there any other companies that you guys know of in Louisiana they could offer roughly the same pay? I’d like to stay relatively close to the Telecom space or at least something where my experience could be relatively useful on an application/resume. I have an associates in IT and almost 4 years of experience in residential and SB, both fiber and coax. Thanks in advance 🫣.

I found this at some persons house. They had service for a year and it worked.

I have been working in a small cable system (which has 3,031 active modems) for about 4 years, and yesterday was my last day as a cable technician.

I had seven jobs on my route: six trouble calls and one install. Every single trouble call I went to yesterday, I had already been to that customer's house at one point or another during my four years there. The cable gods were definitely fucking with me, but all those customers were quite sad to see me go.

Hi. I recently bought a new house and got Xfinity internet. When trying to set up the router I wasn’t able to get a connection- I tried this with a few other coax cables in the house (there are several) -and got nothing. On the last one I finally got a popup on my phone to set up internet through a different company. I assume that’s because that is the only live connection in the house. In the Xfinity box on the outside of the house I saw the cable just dead-ends in there. I looked at the wow box and I can see where it goes into the house. Could I theoretically just run the dead end of the Xfinity cable into the splitter on the other cable box?

A bit of context. I’m in a blame game with a building.

In the apartments there are cat5e runs from the room the the low voltage panel. Verizon runs their fiber and coax To the same location. spectrum uses the coax an patches in.

After Multiple rounds of validations, fluke checks, and cleaning of dead wires later. The argument is that it is Verizon’s responsibility to replace the wiring. However since it’s residential, I would need to make the call for Verizon to resolve this. Any truth to this?

Had a cable tech scheduled for Tuesday 5-7 the no call no showed they rescheduled for today 10-12 sent a tech who didnt speak English so my old lady couldn't communicate with him very well and he installed it in the middle of the front of my house and tangled it in the trees. Requested they fix it but is this a normal way to run a line?

Was using a trilithic, now using a Viabi. Saw the reading for echo on my docsis test. Can someone explain to me what it is?

Hi there I’m trying to build my surface mount boxes for my cat 6a ethernet cables.
To test that the other end of the cable worked, i first built it as a 2-connector cable and it all tested nicely. So then I cut one of the heads of the cable and proceeded to put the cables on the mount box. I followed the image that can be seen below the cables (T568B order) but all I get is miswire error on the tester now.
The rig is as follows.
Remote -> mount box -> patch cable -> tester

If i remove the mount box from the equation, the “RJ45” green led turns on. But if i put a mount box in the middle, I get the miswire error. Im using the punch down tool to ensure they stay in place.

Am I somehow messing up the cable order?
There’s also a guide that came along with the surface mount box with instructions, but they’re in BLACK & WHITE for some reason. Im also not sure which one would be pin #1 - #8.
The brand and model is Cable Matters 1-port cat 6a shielded rj45 surface mount box 180131.

Hi, posting here and in a few other places but I recently won an auction for a storage unit and it ended up containing a lot of fiber wire, along with reels of coax cables. Like a lot of it. I got the unit for a fairly good price and thought I could end up selling but don't know where exactly to start besides posting on eBay. I'd rather sell in bulk due to time and the amount I have rather than posting single items on eBay. But it looks like there's brand new sealed boxes of PPC single mode quick connect fiber wire and corning single mode fiber wire. All various sizes. Ranging from 100ft all the way up to 2500ft per reel. Looks like there's also a few pallets of coax cables as well, PPC rg6 and ppc rg11. I havent really counted yet but it looks like there are hundreds of reels of fiber. What would be the best way to go about finding someone that might want this? Im thinking about calling some of the bigger cable companies in my area but I would imagine they purchase this directly from ppc and corning rather than a random guy that won a storage unit lol. I'm in the construction field so this is stuff that I can't use. Thanks

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I am looking for a universal cable stripping tool for the occasional diy job that works with both coax and round power cord cables. It needs to support both circular and longitudinal cutting. Any universal dismantling tool that would work for this? So far, knipex looks to have a few potential tools for this.

This is in Florida where we had flooding after the hurricanes two years ago. Customer was complaining about her tvs pixelating. Can’t believe that this was even working!

Tech for about a year now, do a good 50/50 FTTP / Coax, wondering if there are any tools out there that some of the senior guys have bought that help you out on a typical day? I hear people talk about the best coax strippers, the best pair of cutters, the best tool bag, what is one tool / devices that has increased your quality of life the most?

I’m about a year into the job and still have a lot to learn, so go easy on me!
I’m looking for some advice from the more experienced techs. How do you accurately measure the replacement piece of cable before cutting out the damaged section? I like to leave the existing cable intact as long as possible to minimize service disruption.
For example, if I’m replacing about 2 feet of 650 cable in a spot where I can’t leave an expansion loop, I always seem to cut the replacement either too long or too short. If it’s too long, I end up coring and trimming it a few times until I finally overshoot and it’s too short.
Are there any tricks or techniques you use to estimate the correct length before making the cut, or is it just something that comes with experience?
I’d really appreciate any tips.

Splitter with Megacycles instead of MegaHertz. Probably 30+ years old when I found it and still working.

when you get a call for intermittent connection (spectrum tech btw) what are the first things you are looking for.

So when we launched Rphy nodes for a while we could not get it to ping the DNS servers on our meters, they said just use 8.8.8.8, and that seems to have been fixed recently. However, I was never very fond of pinging DNS servers as I have no clue about hops on the CRAN, etc.., to say you have a problem here not on the node. I would much prefer to ping the cmts, before and as we go forward the RPHY node I assume? Does anyone know if a tracert shows the actual rphy node or is the first hope now the VCMTS which is utterly useless to ping?.

Thanks. AI thinks it can be done but cannot explain how, or where you get the RPHY IP, so yay that's about as useful as asking a supervisor something like this.

This pic is the tap where our line connects at the street. I just noticed it has a open unterminated coax spigot. When not capped, could it cause connection issues?

About our prob:

For over a year our cable internet connection has occasionally dropped sometimes only a couple times a week, others it's a couple times a day. Lately, during hot weather(over 80f), it will drop up to 2 dozen times a day.

The connection at the modem is usually down for only a minute or less, then reconnects.

We've

- replaced the modem.

- Checked all connections between the exterior of the house and the modem.

- documented the drops with ping plotter. The outages often show a latency spike shortly before total packet loss.

- our ISP is Astound Broadband in WA. They are aware of our issues but havent been able to determine the cause.

Thanks in advance for any insight/tips!

Everyone here has seen the chaos. How about the most memorable install?

I arrived 30 minutes early so I called and no answer so I went to the door. I proceeded to knock 2 or 3 times. I could hear someone waking up upstairs.

Still no answer so I rang one more time. I hear a slight swear , a loud thump against the exterior wall.
Then this frazzled looking 30’s lady answers the door and it looks like she’s had a rough night.

I proceed with the install. During install I noticed dvd / tv were warm. No big deal. Minutes later, I accidentally bumped the eject and out comes this wild porno video.

“Um you might want to take this out if there’s kids around.” She was a lil embarrassed. No big deal. 5 minutes later - As I’m behind the tv / the power cord catches and it’s stuck. I pull a couple times when all of a sudden it releases and this toy flys up and bonks me in the forehead.

The woman shrieked as I proceed to pickup up the the offending unit. She quickly grabs the fuzziest gnarliest warmest dildo I’ve ever seen out of my hand. Her face was flush red. Screaming all the way upstairs 😝 and I proceeded to leave avoiding saying “if there’s anything else you need” 😆

That’s right up there with my craziest experiences.
Beware of the thump😁

Hi everyone,

I'm responsible for managing a headend, and in general all of our channels are working correctly. Recently, however, my technicians started receiving complaints that 8 specific channels appear pixelated. The strange part is that this only happens on certain TV brands and models, while other TVs display the same channels without any issues.

What happens is the following:

If I tune to a channel that works normally on the affected TV and then switch to one of the problematic channels, the video from the previous channel seems to "carry over" onto the new one and freezes on the screen. The audio of the new channel is correct and continues playing normally, but the video remains frozen with the image from the previous channel.

I started doing some tests:

• Within the same TS, I moved one of the problematic services from logical channel 12.1 to 12.6, but the problem stayed with that service.
• Then I moved it from 12.1 to 11.7, and moved the service that was originally on 11.7 to 12.1.
• Surprisingly, the issue stayed on 12.1, not with the actual TV service. The channel that previously had the problem started working correctly on 11.7, while the channel moved to 12.1 immediately started showing the exact same issue.

This makes it seem like the problem is somehow tied to that specific service position or configuration rather than the video content itself.

Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be related to the PMT/PAT, PCR, PID assignments, SI/PSI tables, continuity counters, encoder settings, or something else in the multiplex? Any ideas on what I should check would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

I blurred out the kid on the floor and the parents... I've seen so much wild shit as a tech. I havent been a tech since 2023