Design Flaw I experienced

[maskoht]

I just got the Comcast Tivo on a fresh Motorola DCH3416 late last week. This weekend I had a big problem with my Comcast Tivo: It was stuck at the "Welcome, Starting up" screen and wouldn't go past this. The status code on the LED was di01. All support could tell me is that the internal Docsis modem was not talking back to Comcast (upstream). The internal modem also had no IP address. After a power cycles they opted to just send out a tech, on Wednesday, too long for me to wait, so I kept troubleshooting by myself and hung up with the support rep.

I found that my other (SD) cable box could not get on-demand.
After finding the diagnostic menu I found that the SNR was poor.
I finally fixed the problem by replacing the splitter (that comcast gave me) with an alternate one I had. After this, things went back to normal.

However, in this whole 3-4 hours of troubleshooting I did, the box never made it past the Welcome screen. This is quite a design flaw I would say. Why is dossis connection absolutely necessary for box operation. I seems they should have planned for some sort of offline mode. It would seem that anytime the Internet is down, the Tivo box is potentially down.
Note: if your box is not restarted during the outage you may be OK. It only appears to be a fatal error during the start up process.
In the words of the support rep, "All you can do is go cable-direct until we can get out to you."

[exigent2]

Thats a design "feature". Its all about collections. If your service is physically disconnected for nonpay (or in your case the drv just couldn't get past the bad splitter) the dvr will NOT boot up all the way. This effectively prevents you from watching all that programing you saved. This gives you a fairly good reason to give the box back... otherwise you may decided to keep it and watch your 50 hours of adult movies :)

Oh... and outage or not as far as i know if the link from to drv to our hub is severed for almost any length of time the box will go into download mode (di01 is actually dl) which is what you experienced. Normally only a service signal will pull it out of that condition. Yes its cumbersome... but you have to understand they REALLY want to get that $400-$500 box back.

They never did this in the beginning as far as I know. However I know for a fact they all do it now. You see we used to have a problem getting boxes back. Now... not so much.

[maskoht]

Thanks for the clarification. As a technical person myself, I am relieved to hear that it was not just bad design. Programmers often get mandates from the business side of any company such as you state.

In reviewing your remarks, I understand the reasoning of Comcast to do such things as a deterrent to theft / fraud / etc.

However my feeling is that "features" as you describe should err on the side of caution the user, even if only for the first X times. (Assume innocent at first instead of guilty right away)
There is a creative compromise out there is people such as the Comcast/Tivo partnership are willing to work on it.