Internet service

Yes it does make sense and since i have neither cable TV or a digital TV I really don't know what the story is. They can certainly send you signal without requiring the box however what the box provides for them is way to control what you view. Don't they all come with that card now? e.g if they are sending pay for stations or encrypted content the box will have the maens to decrypt or know what you're allowed to view...

Richard S. wrote:They can certainly send you signal without requiring the box however what the box provides for them is way to control what you view.

I think you hit the nail on the head Richard!! It must be so that they can limit the digital stations that you can receive to fit one of their high priced packages! (the thieves!! )

Technically they could, but they have many business reasons not to do so.

Yanche wrote:Technically they could, but they have many business reasons not to do so.

Agreed Yanche......& all those many, many "business reasons" have the pictures of dead Presidents on them!

They charge you an extra sum of money for each digital box required to view the better channels! But they have not raised their rate to view the base channels.
Just like the soap/mayo/soup container that holds less product but the same price as the larger earlier version. It is a price increase that is not a price increase.

Over the last few weeks I noticed my web page updates and email downloads getting slower and slower via my DSL connection. We had a couple storms over the summer and I thought it was probably related to a degraded line on the Verizon side of the interface box. They had to fix one of our other lines a few weeks back on their side after one of the storms, so I was thinking it could be a degraded line on the number we use for the DSL service - good enough for voice, but not so good for data.

I dreaded calling Verizon support, my past experience with them has been horrible. I have called them a few times to notify them of a network outage (about 5 of us in the neighborhood check with each other to see if we're all down) and they would always insist on running through a 30 minute modem check and even sent me a new modem once. It always turns out to be a network outage on their side when all of us are down but you can't convince the support drones in the Philippines of this.

It finally got me bothered enough to start to look into it when my download speeds were registering below the 30K range. I took someones suggestion in this thread and found another phone jack cable that was long enough to reach outside and plugged my modem directly into the interface box outside the house and checked my speed. WOW, up near 300k download speed!! I went downstairs and started tightening the terminal block screws where the lines split and tested back in the office phone jack - still around 30k. I tried the modem in a different phone jack in the living room using the long cable and back up near 300k!

hmmmmm.... I removed the short phone cable from the office jack, replaced it with the longer cable i used for outside testing and the speed was up near 300k!!!

Couldn't believe it would be something that simple, so I switched back to the short cable and I was back to below 30k....long cable again - near 300k.

Just thought I would mention this in case anyone was running into similar issues, they could try the simple cable swap thing first!

Add 'Burp the lines' to your basket of tricks.
It is just a science experiment where you need to eliminate as may variables as possible.
Always assume the part is bad unless you can prove/know it is good.

The DSL signal you receive is susceptible to degradation by the capacitance of the connecting line to your DSL modem. If you look at the short telephone line cable that was supplied with your DSL modem it will have only two conductors. Look through the clear connector to see. When you use any other common telephone connection cable it frequently has four conductors, which allows use of a two line phone. When used with a DSL modem the unused line increases capacitance reducing the max speed. The ideal connection is a DSL filer in the box outside your house and a dedicated line from this filter to your DSL modem. This line should be only two conductor twisted pair. This is hard to find other than from electronic wire specialty manufacturers. The closest you can likely find is CAT 3 two pair wire. Yes, category 3, not 5 or 7. If you have a very long run from the DSL filter to where your DSL modem is (100+ ft.) you should move the modem closer and then make the long run with a network cable.