Another Cablevision outage

OnEasternParkway wrote: VeggieQueen, you only would have noticed the outage if you tried to watch ABC, NBC, CBS, and maybe Thirteen. Everything else was functioning normally.

On a related note, did Cablevision recently eliminate quite a few channels, including VH1 Classic?

OnEasternParkway wrote:
On a related note, did Cablevision recently eliminate quite a few channels, including VH1 Classic?

Bump!

My Internet/cable/phone have all been out for the past couple of hours. I'm at Dean & Carlton. Anyone else having problems?

took forever to send above / /

Spoken by someone who doesn't understand much about technology.

It's like comparing the reliability of a hula-hoop and an automobile, since, after all, they're both based on wheels.

POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service, the industry-standard term) lines are analog devices that work much like a microphone and speaker. They require nothing other than electrical switching technology and current in order to connect you with the other party. As long as you have a physical electrical connection, you're good to go. The signal is at no more than 3,400 cycles per second (compared to an audio CD which has 44,100 cycles per second in playback) and even if some of those cycles get lost, you probably will still get the message across, because most of the encoding and decoding of the communication is done by your brain.

Your cable modem, by comparison, is a phenomenally complicated device that converts digital information into analog signals for transmission millions of times per second. This signal is then terminated at a fiber-optic junction box that's probably sitting on a pole somewhere in your backyard, and translated into beams of light for further aggregation and transmission back to the central office, where it is again terminated and eventually plumbed into a network of Ethernet routers and switches.

This describes only the physical signaling layer involved. On top of this, there is the need to deliver your information not just to a single other party, but to the entire internet all at once, so you can browse Brooklynian while you instant message your friends and download porn. This involves protocols of communication and negotiation that can break down for a variety of reasons. All of these things also need error detection and correction, so the occasional stray byte doesn't get into that Word document your boss sent you to review and render it unreadable.

And so forth. We're just scratching the surface here. Rest assured that while running an electronically-switched POTS network is an engineering challenge, it is one that is generally better understood and has far fewer variables and moving parts.

Just read an article on Bloomberg that Cablevision is raising the monthly bill by $2.98 to cover the cost of sports programming. This is in addition to the $5/month they just hiked the bill for internet service.