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Highlands Today

Internet and television problems

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By Raleigh Whiteman | Highlands Today

Published: September 24, 2009

For the past few years my computer has been plagued with a poor Internet connection, causing me to have to reset my modem and router several times a day. Many times it would not come back and I would call Comcast to see if they were in service in our area and was frequently told by a recording that they were experiencing problems in the Sebring area and would have the problem fixed shortly.

I always assumed it was their fault and would wait patiently until a good connection would come back.

This was happening when we were being warned that the television stations were going to digital communications and if we were on cable we would not have any problems, so several months ago we bought two large HD LCD televisions. I noticed shortly afterward that on the HD channels the sound would go out frequently. It seemed to happen most often just when something important was being said. Also the larger of the TVs would pixilate and the picture would freeze. Since I had bought it at Circuit City on a close-out sale and they had gone out of business I could not return it and thought I was stuck with a bad TV.

Repair attempt failed
I became very frustrated with the intermittent Internet service and had called Comcast repeatedly to get some relief. A few weeks ago they sent a serviceman and he replaced some wires and connections and thought it was the source of my problems. He left and within an hour the TVs were acting up again and the Internet was down. I called Comcast and they reset everything from their office and made it work again. It worked until the next morning and the TVs began to malfunction again. Later in the day the Internet went down again. It was the last straw. I was fed up and scheduled one of the satellite TV providers and a local Internet service to come out and put in their service the next week. It was going to cause me a big problem in changing my service provider and having to communicate my change of e-mail address with the dozens of people that would be sending me their news for the paper I publish within a few weeks.

Better connections
I called Comcast and told them I was going to cancel with them because I could not tolerate the poor service and connection I was getting from them. They sent out another technician the next morning, he went through every connection and found that the cable to the computer made several years ago to my computer had a very poor connection and a splitter in the attic needed replacement. Since then the TVs and computers have been working perfectly. It appears the problems were always in my cable connections.

I canceled the previous appointments. Hopefully Comcast has solved their problems in the Highlands area and will stay online continuously in the future.

If any of you are experiencing your HDTV acting up with loss of sound or picture freezing, give your provider a call and have them check your cable connections.

HD costs more
Do you remember back when they were telling us that if we were on cable we would not have to do anything? Perhaps that was misleading. For LCD or Plasma HDTV's a receiver box is necessary, and if you want to receive HD on any additional TVs additional receiver is necessary for each TV with additional charges.

Raleigh Whiteman, of Lake Placid, is a contributing writer to Highlands Today. You can reach him on the Internet at rwwhiteman@comcast.net

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