TWC and Charter Merging

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I've done it a couple of times without any problems. The pairing was active after a few minutes; they didn't seem to be batching it up for a manual operation as someone has suggested.

But TWC is infamous for having a bad website, I don't doubt your own experience one bit.

 

In my area (Fort Worth), it seems like they are more locked down about the CCI byte. For example, The CW has an 0x02 byte set along with CSPAN2-HD, and several sub-channels that you can get normally from OTA(Buzzr, Decades to name a few). All these encrypted channels except CSPAN2 are FCC violations but it seems that nobody but perhaps a few at the master headend know what you're talking about when mentioning CCI bytes. I've sent in an FCC complaint and also had a technician mention this issue to his boss but these have not resulted in any changes. I only have locals but when I briefly had basic about 5.5 years ago, the CCI byte seemed to be on everything but the locals(and The Weather Channel and CSPAN(s)).

As far as getting a cablecard paired, the CSRs don't seem to have any clue how to pair a cablecard. I've had times where they would just keep sending "hits" to the tivo to the instance where they asked for my TSN(I could say they were since they were asking for the serial number on the back of my tivo). I have always been able to get the card paired when I have truck roll and the technicians call a special number available only to them (granted I have done this only a handful of times). I have paired a cablecard and Tivo with Time Warner and their online submission has worked well for me. Even with the tuning adapter, I haven't had problems with having to reset my TA since they gave me a brand new one(but this has only been about two months).

 

Always call the National CableCard Support hotline for Time Warner with either CableCard or tuning adapter issues. You can sometimes get help at the local numbers, but more times than not, you get people clueless about anything related to CableCards.

 

So what is (was?) the URL for TWC's online CableCARD pairing? Asking just out of curiosity because I never heard of it -- I would still prefer their national CableCARD help desk.

 

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The TWC National Cable Card Hotline is really good. Due to a temporary move, I had to transfer my account three times within six months, and they definitely know what they're doing. The one snag was one time I had to wait till the morning, cause I think they shut down at 11pm et. Really nice to reach someone who knows what a cable card and a Tivo is.

 

http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/support/tv/topics/cablecard-pairing-form.html

 

I was specifically referring to my cablecard experiences with Charter. The mention of Time Warner's online system at the end was to contrast the differences in experience I've had with both.

 

I'm on Charter in Gwinnett County Georgia, and have been with them since I bought my first TiVo (a Series 1). At my peak I had 5 cable cards running in 4 different TiVos (had the original series 3 which didn't support multi-stream cards) along with TAs for all.

Overall cable card / TiVO support hasn't been too bad, and once they're working I haven't had repeat issues.

 

The only tricky part with Cablecards on Charter is when you move them. Just pairing a new one is rarely a big deal anymore. Moving them requires a supervisor to remove the pairing but very few reps know why it doesn't work when they don't get the supervisor to do it.

 

Very true. The good news is I can generally get through to tech support fairly quickly, and with a little persistence can usually get someone on the line that knows what they're doing (or whom to ask

 

It's hard to generalize about a large company. I moved a card from a Premiere being sold to a newly acquired Roamio. First responder to my call to Charter handled it quickly and flawlessly. Probably luck of the draw.

 

I've re-paired Cablecards in new devices probably 6-7 times in the last two years (and many more before it). It wasn't until last year that Charter put the supervisor requirement into place for removing pairing. I've hit that snag with the rep every time since then. But I know to ask for a supervisor so it isn't a big deal to me.

 

Having used it back when I got my Elite, it was quite nice (save the 45min hold time) - people that knew what they were doing & where to look when things went wacky.

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