This is the most important thing to understand about the installation: A majority of Comcast employees either don’t know a thing about CableCards/TiVo or they actually have false assumptions about them. This includes the techs (contractors) who come out to “install” them.

Comcast first tried to tell me I needed a “TiVo Card”. Rusty mentioned that they told him the same thing, so it sounds like there is some slight misinformation regarding CableCards over at Comcast HQ. The FCC mandates that MSOs provide CableCards to any customer who asks, and that these CableCards are each compatible with any device on the CableLabs list of approved devices (including both HD TiVos). Any CableCard will work with any approved device. Comcast gets confused because they happen to stock some cards that Motorola or SA have put a TiVo logo on. I think these are S-Cards, but either way, the logo doesn’t matter. You just need any M-Card or two S-Cards.

I picked my card up from the Greenbriar Mall store because they are open on Saturdays and I didn’t want to pay for the truck roll. I then proceeded to spend about 4 hours on the phone with a whole parade of idiots who had absolutely no training on CableCards, as far as I could tell. They kept telling me that A) I needed a “TiVo Card”, B) there was something wrong with the TiVo itself, and finally C) the CableCard must be broken. And because I had read many of the TiVo Community forum threads, I kept calling back to try to “win the CSR lottery” and get someone who could actually help me. I never did. They all gave up and I finally gave in and let them schedule me a service call. (Though since it was for existing equipment rather than a “new install”, there was no fee.) I asked them twice to note on the account that the guy should bring extra M-Cards and S-Cards with him in case there was a hardware issue.

Anyway, the guy actually showed up during my service window and he had never set up a TiVo before. Installing the card yourself is essentially the same thing as having a tech come install it because one of you is going to be on the phone with customer service for a long time with mixed results. He fiddled with the menus a bit, tested my signal strength (which was very good), and had me restart the box twice, which takes ~8 minutes each time. No luck. I asked if he had any CableCards with him and he fumbled in his bag and said “Uh, I have this thing, is this one?” and pulled out a card. He had brought a single S-card and no new M-Cards. He finally determined that the card they gave me was assigned to the wrong billing region. They reset it, and the channels started working.

From what I understand, each of the following is necessary in order for your cable card to work:

• pairing - The Host (TiVo) has to be paired with the CableCard. This takes place at the head end and I believe has something to do with the encryption and keys and stuff. If the device isn’t paired with the card in their system, it can’t decrypt the cable signal. The CSRs on the phone seem to think they merely need the Serial Number to pair it, but they actually need the Serial Number, the Host ID, and the Data Value. Once the card is in your box, you can get these numbers off of the CableCard menus.
• activation - The card itself also has to be activated. I think this process just tells Comcast’s system that this is a valid serial number and that it’s tied to a customer’s account.
• billing region (don’t know if that’s the exact term) - The equipment (card) also has to be billed under the region where you get service. Apparently the Atlanta market is divided into two regions: Stone Mountain and Vinings. Not that you live in either, but I guess that’s where each location’s base of operations is, or whatever. I don’t know where the boundaries are, but they apparently don’t overlap. The Greenbriar mall store likes to give out CableCards tied to the Stone Mountain area, even if the customer is in the Vinings area. If your card is tied to the wrong billing area, it will not work in your device even if it is both active and paired. None of the CSRs I spoke with on the phone ever mentioned this, and they probably didn’t even know about it. This actually turned out to be the entire problem with our install.

Another tip - if, at some point, you reboot the TiVo and it says “Please wait.. this may take up to an hour or more”, don’t let your tech freak out and leave. It’s your first software update and it will only take 15-20 minutes. My box did this while he was trying to set it up and he very nearly left because he didn’t “have an hour to waste on TiVo’s issue.” I had to talk him into staying and just hope that it didn’t really take an hour. If I had let him leave, I would have had to go another few days without a working box because I would have had to reschedule. Major pain.

As you can see, I said very little about the hardware itself. Generally, if you can put the CableCard into the box and the TiVo recognizes it, it’s a working card. Comcast will try to tell you it’s not working, and I suppose it is possible, but it’s far more likely that it’s one of the myriad steps on their end that they may not even know they had to complete. That’s what was so frustrating about my four hours on the phone with them. Having read all of the horror stories, I knew that it was almost guaranteed that the issue was something that Comcast could fix on their end if they weren’t just ignorant. And in the end, I was right. The tech did nothing that I hadn’t already done; the phone reps just knew that they couldn’t pass him off like they could me and they eventually figured out what the problem was.

While the tech’s speakerphone was playing Comcast’s on-hold music for the third time, he asked “so what’s the big deal with these TiVos… Why do you want to go to so much trouble to use this instead of just using our DVR?” What I thought, but didn’t say, was that I want to depend on Comcast as little as possible for my cable TV experience. Their DVR/cable box is a physical manifestation of the organizational suckitude that permeates everything they do.

photo credit: rick