Comcast cablecard problem - a new manifestation

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I have had two cc from comcast in my S3 for 10 months without major problems.

Suddenly on Wednesday I lost the premium channels one one cablecard (#2).

I called Comcast and got the normal run around from CSR (the first one told me it was due to recent flooding in my neighborhood - I hung up and called back). Tried many hits, no help. I asked for a supervisor, same results. I asked for an initialization hit, rather than basic hit and she said only Mike can do that and he'll call me back.

Lo and behold, 1/2 hour later Mike called back and we tried many things. One interesting thing he tried: we swapped the cards, repaired them, and I still couldn't get premium channels on cc #2 (now a physically different card). The CA screen kept saying "NOT-SUBSCRIBED" and no amount or flavor of hits would change it.

He then said that they don't send out the hits to a specific card, but actually send them out to the "Outlets" in the system, which are matched to a specific card. So he swapped around the outlets on his system (reorganized them to cc2 for outlet A, cc1 for Outlet B and Phone for Outlet C), and we found that Additional Outlet B would not receive the proper authorization, no matter what card it was assigned to.

We both were scratching our heads when I mentioned to him that my most recent bill from Comcast had three charges for cablecards, instead of the two that I had before. The charges were now: (1) Cable card $0.00 (2) Cable Card Same Device $1.50 and (3) Additional Cable Card $2.00. I never had the third charge before.

He checked my account and said that someone in billing had made a mistake, and the charge had been reversed and eliminated on August 8 (Wednesday), the day my problems started.

He added the charge back in, rehit my cards, and everything was working fine. He said that this should not be the case and he would report it to a manager. Gave me his direct dial number and told me to call back tomorrow to see what the resolution will be. (Told him I would call between my golf round and the Steeler kick-off).

By the way, he said that he has the ability to send four types of hits which he described as:

Validation - Pairs the host and card (with data number)
Initialization - resets the channel mapping (frequency to channel number)
Hit - sends the authorization codes for channels that you can receive
Cold Init - reloads the cc firmware and initializes (although I think that it actually just resets and restarts the firmware).

Another interesting fact that we found. When you pull out the cc and swap it to another slot it resets the data number and must be re-paired. I would have thought that since the host didn't change that wouldn't be necessary. Not the case.

There is no magic solution to all the cablecard problems, but this is just one more manifestation that may help someone else.

Kudos to Mike in Pittsburgh. Never had a more patient and knowledgeable CSR - from any company.

 

Well, after two days Comcast found that the only way I can get the premium channels on both tuners was to put the charge for the third cablecard back on my bill, even though the only cards I have are the two in the S3. So now I have charges for:

(1) Cable card $0.00
(2) Cable Card Same Device $1.50
(3) Additional Cable Card $2.00.

They said they will just manually give me a credit of $2.00 each month until they solve the problem.

They also said that they just installed new billing software, but they don't think that is the problem. I have my doubts.