Our cable has been having some problems over the last few weeks. I’m not sure if it post-dates the DVR coming in (over a week) or not. We’d just get intermittent drops in service quality — the modem would go out (the “Cable” light would blink on and off slowly), and the picture would degrade slightly. This would happen for 5-20 minutes, then everything would go back to normal. It might recur in another five minutes, or it might not happen for hours later.
So we got the cable man out today. Comcast had confirmed over the phone that they’d seen service drop on and off from our He poked around in the snowy back yard for a while, and tut-tutted over how the wiring was done back there, how things were grounded, etc. Of course, that’s how it’s been since we moved into the house, but …
So he grounded things properly, and re-ran the cable from the junction point where it runs to the house, and in and up. He got to see first-hand what these outages have looked like, which was nice, too.
We’ll see how it works. If it wasn’t the external wiring, he says, it’s the line to the house, which would be a royal pain to do something about …