[Folsom]

I'm checking in on my old man. He switched to Charter because they're legally required to offer internet soon, so he can bundle. The DSL people revoked his account... said he used too much bandwidth which is funny because he hardly uses anything and they don't have a cap requirment.

Anyway, we're going to watch The Walking Dead. The picture looks like a video game from 1998. It's shit! He does have 70" TV, Samsung. It has to be in wide mode to fill it, even with the cable box set to 1080i. It has blurring and stuff. You can barely read text that isn't on the guide menu.

So I did a search and he's only got 10 HD channels; they look fine. He has the DHC6200 from Motorola. The audio outputs have failed on the box, so he's forced to use TV speakers while his Hawthorne OB Iris speakers with $200 worth of Obbligato caps on top of stereo subs sit and do nothing. He's called and requested a new box weeks ago. He told me it took 2 months to be able to do online payments.

WTF? Is this normal?

[Bob in St. Louis]

"No". Completely not normal 
Is he extremely rural?

There's always a MOHU 60. 

[youravhandyman]

Folsom,

If his DSL account was revoked for bandwidth issues it seems likely his computer is infected.  Shouldn't be able to exceed bandwidth limitations without a serious issue.  Possible that his Wifi was unsecured?

Matt

[Folsom]

Rural in a town of around 5-7k.

His computer is fine as far as I know. He has advanced AVG. But here's the thing, the phone company here has been doing dirty stuff to avoid upgrading since I was a kid. There's an excellent chance they try to dwindle their users. They wouldn't offer DSL except they're legally required to do so. I remember being on line-of-site internet when I was a kid, in town.

Maybe the broke-ass box also has broken upscaling?

[Folsom]

I get zero results within 60 miles for antenna HD.

[Scott F.]

I can't say I'm familiar with the box he has but we're a Charter customer and we don't have any issues at all. We've got a 65" plasma and the feed is really good. On the internet side of things, it took us at least a couple years to get the bugs worked out of Charter's wiring but they finally came through.

We are what most would consider rural. We are literally, the last house on the cable run. For about two years, we'd regularly call for dropped internet. They'd send a guy out, I'd prove to him packet loss and latency issues, he'd 'fix' something, it would work for a while and then we'd have the same issues again. Repeat process, over and over, until earlier this year. I turned my wife loose on them (Hell hath no fury...). They finally sent a guy that actually knew what he was doing and he got it fixed.

Bottom line, other than the ridiculous price they charge for their service, we're pretty happy their quality. We live on streaming video and when we do watch cable, the feeds are quality.

I'm surprised that you only have 10 HD channels. We've got to have 50 or 60, not including premium movie channels that we don't subscribe to.

[Odal3]

Re using too much bandwidth on DSL - is he using a wifi router? If so, make sure the wifi is locked down and change the password. Even if rural, someone may 'borrow' the line.

I don't get why they scale down the functionality on some of the boxes. Happend to me too when I had comcast - I'm now on antenna.

Is the picture only bad from that box or can he get good picture elsewhere? If you haven't already, check the cable routing from the outside source all the way to the TV. There may be a bad connection somewhere around or that the installer used a bad splitter to feed the signal to different rooms. I had a similar problem, and found that the previous owner had two 4 way splitters in row up in the attic in the garage. Once I removed it, it worked better. Easiest way to check is to disconnect the cable if accessable and direct connect it to a TV (maybe he has a second one that is much smaller that can be moved for the test). Other problems I have had is that once it's gets colder outside, the connections in the cable loosens a bit, and requires little bit of buffing/cleaning.
May not work, but worth a try.

For the audio, if the motorola box has HDMI, you can perhaps look into an HDMI descaler to splits the video and audio feed or pick up any modern HT AVR with HDMI in/out plus pre-outs.

[Folsom]

I got the sound to work.

The HD channels look ok, but the others are just awful.