Months ago I switched to Comcast cable for internet service because SBC DSL was just too unreliable in my neighborhood. But over that last several weeks I’d been seeing more outages. I didn’t think much of this because they were not as often as the old DSL had been. Then this morning, waking up not feeling too well, WillowBrow, who was also battling some nasty bug, tells me that the internet connection is out. She was already pretty pissed off for other reasons I won’t go into here.
I check the connection and do all of the usual things, power cycle, etc., and then call Comcast. Since I’m too sick for work anyway, I schedule a service call for the afternoon. I didn’t want to wait around doing nothing, so I checking the tv signal too. The standard cable channels looked fine, but the digital channels were suffering some heavy pixelation. After that it became clear to me that the problem was not on my end at all. Indeed, I’d been seeing more pixelation on all of the digital channels I usually watch, but had blamed it on TiVo bugs, sorry TiVo.
In the end, the technician found that too much bird poop on the ports in the cable box up the pole in back was a big part of the problem. So he took care of that and installed another device to import the signal and we were back in business, poop free.