Precipitous drop in signal level -- FiOS, Burlington, MA

[sinanju]

My TiVo has been more or less happy with -12dB of attenuation on FiOS. Today I came home to find severe pixelation and, in some cases, complete failure to lock. Channels that had a signal strength around 90 were suddenly around 40. I believe it occurred some time between noon and 6pm.

Removing the attenuation put things right. My concern is that this situation may come and go. I recycled the TiVo and the ONT and the situation remained at what may be a "new normal".

Did anyone else see this?

[nbw]

Interesting. I too am in the Burlington FiOS area (Reading) and over the past several weeks have been seeing a pixelation on most all channels, both live and recorded programming. In another room I have the FiOS DVR and that has not experienced any pixelation. Your post mentioned measuring signal attenuation. How are you able to do that? Do you have any recommendations for handling this problem? FWIW I have a very old FiOS install, still with the DLink router and separate little black box for provisioning. My battery and AC backup are two separate units as well. My TiVO is a series 3 HD w/a M card.

TIA

-NBW

[bicker]

You're both making me feel better about sticking with Comcast. :shrug:

[nbw]

I'm very happy with FiOS having switched from Comcast in terms of the price, programming and of course the 20/5 mb dedicated fibre Internet connection. The pixelation is something new and seems to only affect the TiVO vs. the FiOS dvr. I remember when I was on Comcast I would regularly get pixelation due to Comcast's lack of necessary bandwidth on their copper infrastructure. This was especially annoying when I was watching football.

Now, that said, Comcast did visit me with a tempting offer. They've just installed dedicated fibre in my neighborhood and because I don't have an existing copper Comcast line to my house (I had em pull it when I got FiOS) they would run fibre to my house. Their speeds and package they were offering me to switch were actually $30 a month cheaper then what I am paying now for FiOS. I called Verizon and got their customer retention and they not only met Comcast's price but beat it by $10 a month. So yea I'm quite happy with things minus this recent issue.

[bicker]

Comcast dropped my price $40 per month... that's what got me to stick with them -- that and the fact that I don't want to have to resetup port forwarding.