I have a Bolt on cable card using Spectrum (Charter) as my provider. In inquiring about possibly changing packages, I was told that the current plans do not allow for cable card and that it is possible that Spectrum may obsolete cable card in the future. It sounded like more a matter of when than if. Or am I misunderstanding this? I love my Tivo and have had a Series 2 and HD prior to my Bolt. I hate the thought of losing it. I've resisted the lower prices and better offerings from Hawaiian Telcom because I wouldn't be able to use my Tivo.
Spectrum and cable card
bueller555
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It’s not likely Spectrum receivers need the high split converters, just like they don’t need TA’s.
If they did, LOTS more people would be getting these emails/letters… in fact, they’d probably just be sending every receiver household one with instructions.
Yes. Given how few customers are affected -- apparently just those using retail CableCARD devices like TiVos -- I'm surprised that Charter even bothered with a workaround in the form of this new high-split tuning adapter. Kudos to them for supporting their customers like this. Based on the FCC's final report on retail CableCARD usage over a year ago, it appeared that only about 1 in 200 (i.e. 0.5%) eligible pay TV customers were using one. Charter loses well more cable TV customers than that every quarter, so I'm surprised they were concerned enough about the relatively small number of TiVo users to find a way to let them keep using their DVRs.
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I have five CableCards on-hand for my five Edge boxes, so one High Split Adapter per CC. The order page made it sound like it was a one-for-one need, so I ordered appropriately.
Shipping notice this morning, looks like it's be between Friday and Monday for delivery.
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Three boxes with the five high-split converters showed up yesterday via FedEx. Will crack a box open in the next day or to to check it over and work on getting it set up, assuming it can be done now and not later when the change happens.
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I in the St. Louis market area and a few months ago got a letter stating I was going to get a shipment with new equipment. Didn't state why, didn't state what. Nothing ever happened with that as I never got anything.
I have two cable cards, and two tuning adapters by the way.
Fast forward to this week I got a notification that they were going to be doing work overnight and we'd have a service interruption. Next morning everything looked fine, but I noticed that evening that my SDV (switched digital video) channels weren't working on either Tivo. Usually that just requires a reboot of the tuning adapters, which I did. I realized they aren't locking on anymore, just blinking yellow. I know high split is being worked on in the entire market, and I reached out to a Charter friend and he confirmed the OOB frequency the older cable boxes used for their provisioning and interactivity has been removed. At least in my area it did this week.
So it seems these tuning adapters are dead now. Everything else seems to still be working video wise except for the SDV channels. I followed the HSC converter link and entered my info there, so hopefully those will ship soon and fix that.
I have two cable cards, and two tuning adapters by the way.
Fast forward to this week I got a notification that they were going to be doing work overnight and we'd have a service interruption. Next morning everything looked fine, but I noticed that evening that my SDV (switched digital video) channels weren't working on either Tivo. Usually that just requires a reboot of the tuning adapters, which I did. I realized they aren't locking on anymore, just blinking yellow. I know high split is being worked on in the entire market, and I reached out to a Charter friend and he confirmed the OOB frequency the older cable boxes used for their provisioning and interactivity has been removed. At least in my area it did this week.
So it seems these tuning adapters are dead now. Everything else seems to still be working video wise except for the SDV channels. I followed the HSC converter link and entered my info there, so hopefully those will ship soon and fix that.
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Alright, I went through a dry run of the swap of the TA to the HSC and this is what I have to offer:
So, it sounds like equipment-wise, I'm good to go, I just have to wait out to get the email about the cutover date and then go through the motions with the swap of TAs to HSCs. For my relative that received the email that they sent along to me, as they have a date of Jan 16th, I need to find out how many HSCs they need and get those ordered. Once on-site, then it'll be checking to see if there is this "soft-cut" in the five day window before the cutover date with trying to swap from TAs to HSCs.
- The HSC is huge, almost as big as the Edge is. Easily twice as wide as the TA is, plus deeper and a little higher. Ports on the back are the same, cable in + cable out + USB device port + AC port. AC adapter is a small AC adapter, not a plug-in adapter/wall-wart, so it should be easier for plugging it into a surge suppressor or UPS than the wall-wart is. It also comes with two RG-59 / RG-6 RF cables in the box, both Spectrum-branded, and a USB cable.
- The HSC are supposedly pre-activated and the swap is done as a self-install, as the included instructions are to swap out the TA for the HSC and call them if there are any issues post-swap.
- If you've received the email with the IMMEDIATE ACTION NEEDED, then the node your cable TV is connected to has been set with a swap date, which is a month/month-ish from the date of the swap. If you don't have the email yet, your node isn't scheduled for the swap yet and it's a node-by-node conversion. My guess is that they're working on smaller nodes first and moving to more populated nodes further down the swap. I don't have an email yet for that change.
- When I swapped out the TA for the HSC, the TiVo saw it as a TA on its end. I didn't dig through menu settings after the fact to see what looked different from the TA being in place versus the HSC.
- The HSC doesn't work until the high-split happens, though from the manager I spoke with said that there's a "soft-cut" that seems to be going in 5 days before the cut date in the email, which is when the HSC should be potentially ahead of the cut date.
- When I had the HSC in place, there was an obvious "No channels are available" issue like what happens when a TA isn't present or isn't working correctly. Swapping out the HSC for the TA without making any other changes had channels work again like normal.
- When the cut date happens, the TA(s) on the account are deleted since they're no longer useable. The manager said "the CableCards are deleted from the account", to which I questioned the point and they corrected themselves and said it was the TA(s) were the items deleted from the account.
- TA(s) that are no longer in use have to be returned back to Spectrum, either at a Spectrum store location or a UPS Store location, though they will send out a return kit as needed if the options for the other two aren't available for the customer.
- They think there may be a run-up on equipment as they get closer to the cut-over dates, so getting equipment sooner than later would be a prudent move IMO.
So, it sounds like equipment-wise, I'm good to go, I just have to wait out to get the email about the cutover date and then go through the motions with the swap of TAs to HSCs. For my relative that received the email that they sent along to me, as they have a date of Jan 16th, I need to find out how many HSCs they need and get those ordered. Once on-site, then it'll be checking to see if there is this "soft-cut" in the five day window before the cutover date with trying to swap from TAs to HSCs.
Could you please post a couple pics of the new HSC, particularly the connection ports, as it might be helpful to others going thru this.
Not to nitpick, but I think you mean either RG-59 or RG-6
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Sorry, IT guy here, RG-58 is what sticks in my head when I think of coax cable. RG-59 or RG-6, yes, that's right on the mark.Could you please post a couple pics of the new HSC, particularly the connection ports, as it might be helpful to others going thru this.
Not to nitpick, but I think you mean either RG-59 or RG-6
Here are pictures as requested, though I see someone else also posted them.
The blue-circle is for an indicator light that was lit up when it was powered up and on when I was trying to work with it earlier today.
There's certainly a joke to be made about not even getting 1.0 release-level hardware, 0.4 seems to be enough to ship it out the door.
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Thanks for posting all of that info up! I never got an email about my tuning adapters shutting down. I do know they are doing these conversions hub by hub.
This earlier this week both of my tuning adapters stopped working. My cable is still working, but I can't tune any of the SDV channels, but otherwise it's good. I'm hoping I'll get these HSC convertors will ship soon.
This earlier this week both of my tuning adapters stopped working. My cable is still working, but I can't tune any of the SDV channels, but otherwise it's good. I'm hoping I'll get these HSC convertors will ship soon.
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FYI. STL area here. I just hooked up my HSC I received from Spectrum. I have the same letter with the same cutover date. Recognized as tuning adapter and once I rebooted my tivo I had all my channels again. You don't need to wait for the cutover date.
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Good to know that it's in place in advance of this five day "soft cut" date that this Charter rep I spoke with yesterday, so that makes things easier on my end once I get that letter, as well as for my relative who already received it as well.
Thank you for that update.
Looks like a HSC is just a tuning adapter on steroids.
A tuning adapter was basically a neutered cable box that requested the channel you wanted to watch which then got allocated one of the dynamic channels and TiVo tuned to it. I'm guessing a HSC is similar, except it has the ability to downconvert channels, in effect becoming a pretend SDV system. That is, TiVo asks the HSC to tune to a channel, and it internally downconverts it, then tells TiVo what channel it's on and TiVo then uses that information to tune its tuner.
Kinda like how in the old days if you had an old cable converter and a VCR and wanted to record something, you'd program the VCR to record off channel 3 or 4 and tell the converter to tune to a channel at a specific time and date. Except these days it's all automated and digital enabled.
A tuning adapter was basically a neutered cable box that requested the channel you wanted to watch which then got allocated one of the dynamic channels and TiVo tuned to it. I'm guessing a HSC is similar, except it has the ability to downconvert channels, in effect becoming a pretend SDV system. That is, TiVo asks the HSC to tune to a channel, and it internally downconverts it, then tells TiVo what channel it's on and TiVo then uses that information to tune its tuner.
Kinda like how in the old days if you had an old cable converter and a VCR and wanted to record something, you'd program the VCR to record off channel 3 or 4 and tell the converter to tune to a channel at a specific time and date. Except these days it's all automated and digital enabled.
Not really. What has happened here is the OOB channel that carried the forward data from the headend so the Cable Card and company owned STBs could operate has been eliminated as the frequency spectrum where they were located was repurposed for upstream internet. The OOB channel is now broadcasted at a higher frequency and the converter will tune to that OOB signal and rebroadcast it at frequency that the TiVo can tune to so the CableCard can receive its OOB messages and the CableCard can still function. Without OOB messages the CableCard will not function, and the TiVo will not be able to tune to any channel.
INVENTION DISCLOSURE (cablelabs.com)
In my case, while the HSC appears to function correctly as a tuning adaptor, the TiVo doesn't seem to think that a tuning adapter is connected (at least that's what the "Remote, CableCard & Devices" screen shows).
The box with my HSC included a return shipping label; I assume that's what I'll use to send the TAs back, though I'm not going to bother with it until after the holidays.
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Let’s hope the HSC experience will be better than the TA one. I used a TWC/Spectrum TA (1520 model) for 11 years (2009 - 2019) and they never got it right. For the first few years it would lose authorization every month, which required a phone call to get fixed. After that if would simply quit functioning every few weeks, requiring a power-cycle to fix, and usually restarting the TiVo also. Many people on this forum had to power-cycle much more often and even set up lamp timers to do it every day.
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Got my HSC today (in St. Louis City). Was able to hook up and have running in less than 15 minutes. Not sure if it was necessary, but I restarted my TiVo Roamio.
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