I had exactly the opposite experience and I fired them. I suppose it is really what you get locally since there are really very few if any real Comcast employees. They are all "contractors" (AKA trunk slammers) It all depends on who is out of work and willing to take the contract for what they pay.
My cable company sent a sub out here for a VOIP concerns. Hearing cross-talk and stuff.
They pull a cable under the street, where the cable tap was. My wire was corroded and the copper was green.
Free.
Fast, cheap, and easy /= the correct way, in most cases. Putting wiring on the outside, aside from looking UGLY, leads to early failures of cable and connections. And those wall-throughs are just another place for water and bugs to get in. I often see them where the installer didn't even bother to put a drip loop on the cable, or made loops and turns so tight as to degrade the signal.
An extra hour or two to do it the CORRECT way every 20 years or so, should not be a big deal. I'll either do it myself, or hire a wire guy on my own and pay him for his time, versus the crappy piecework rate the cable/satt company would pay him.
Boxes in the wall are NOT required - but a low voltage cable pass through wall plate should be used. They snap into a hule in the drywall for a finished look.
Have your buddy pull in the cable then call comcast to do the terminations - no cost (at least that's how Rogers works). Just make sure you are using the RIGHT cable. Check with your cable provider - most are now using 100% double sheilded cable - stiff stuff to work with and not simple to terminate, compared to the old 80% braid.
My cable provider replaced the cable from basement to upper story with the upgraded cable fee of charge. Just connected the old cable to the new, and pulled the new cable up the wall with the old one (or down- can't remember). Of course it was not stapled - - - - .
So, someone Riddle me this.. If I put the dish in the right place and run on cable to the attic where I have the signal splitter for the cable, why can't I just distriute the dish that way?
The key point here is to have cable "home runs" from a central distribution point to each TV. With satellite you need a switch rather than a splitter, but the distribution remains the same with one exception -- many Dish DVRs can accommodate two TVs with one or two cables from the outside receiving dish to the DVR, and another to the second TV. So you may want to run multiple cables to your primary TV from the central distribution point.
You need the dish to go straight to the tuner but.... If you have "DISH" the tuner box will output a signal on an F connector that you can use to distribute the signal around the house on a cable channel (one channel for each tuner) and the dual tuner model comes with an RF remote that works just about anywhere in the house. I have two dual tuners which gives me four virtual channels (73, 75, 77, 79 that reflect each of the 4 tuners plus ch3 for the output of my Replay TV), all available on any TV in the house. By playing with the RTV inputs that can also be the DVD player or the RF converter for local channels not on the Dish.
I couldn't do anything like that with cable, at least not without renting 6 boxes.
The receiver has to go between the dish and the splitter, unless you want to mess with multiple receivers and the usual added expense for those. IIRC, you have to use some fancy splitter to feed multiple receivers from a single dish. Most splitters won't pass the control signals and voltages back upstream properly. I recommend lurking over in the alt.dbs.* groups for a while- the real satt wizards hang out over there.
The "DISH" installers will give you a special splitter that will let you hang TVs on the line that goes to the dish. I chose too run straight to the tuners and use my existing Comcast cables for distribution behind the tuners.
Huh?
"Looks ugly" - Well, there's that. You COULD do what architects do when they make a mistake or something doesn't look right: cover it with ivy.
"Early failure" - There should be no early failure. You use the same cable as the provider uses from the pole to your house. In fact there should be LESS failure inasmuch as you can locate the run protected from the elements.
"Drip loop" and "water/bugs" - Can both be eliminated by the credo of this group "Do it yourself and do it right."
I did raise the problem of having to locate the TV next to an exterior wall if you wire from the outside, admittedly less than ideal. Now I'll throw the ball back to you:
I suggest it will take more than "a couple of hours" to run a drop TO an outside wall if you're trying to do so from the attic. You can't even GET to the top plate.
Also consider putting a TV jack in a first-floor room via the attic. Shudder.
You can't distribute like that with a dish.
The dish is an electronic device and has power (about 50 volts if memory serves) flowing through the connecting cable. In other words, the wire from the dish to the converter box is not just TV signals, there's two-way electronic communication between the converter box and the LNB (low-noise block downconverter). The LNB is an electronic amplifier.
Kewl beans - Do I need to use a jacketed hollow-point round, or will ball ammo work?
Joe
Dish Network does have a splitter that will let you use the drop from the LNB to also distribute the output of the tuner. I am not sure what it does but I assume the "TV out" balun just won't propagate the voltage component to the TVs.
If you have a handful of Dish hardware, it is the red one.
Cable companies aren't noted for spending money. There is a reason they use snap seal connectors for everything. That is they work in the initial "see it works phase" and unlike others they will continue to give trouble free performance for a long time.
As you noted the crimp connectors are only slightly better than the twist on connectors.
You can, and should. Assuming the cable is up to snuff - And more likely to be OK running the dish on cable from cable provider than the other way around IF there was a problem.
Not a big problem in many homes - just drop the cable town the center wall to the basement, then back up to the first floor.
Not everyone lives in the frozen North, where there are basements. Wish I had one so I wouldn't need to put my shop in the attic.
Not to defend Bub, but large parts of US build houses on slabs- no basement or crawl available. On houses like that, if attic isn't an option for whatever reason, through-the-wall is the only practical (but still ugly) option. But even if you do through-the wall, you can still do it with SOME class- don't just staple it to the siding- tuck it under something wherever you can. If the house has vinyl (which is ugly enough all by itself), see if you can unzip one horizontal joint and hide it behind that. If no way to do it discreetly on the house, I'd be tempted to spring for burial-rated cable, and do a shovel-blade-deep slit around the house to where the entry points were, and bring it up over the exposed foundation in conduit (with sealer to eliminate bug entry path, of course.)
But like I said- outside the house would always be my LAST choice for a cable path. Along centerline of attic, and down through dead spaces or in blind corner of closets. There is almost always some path to get to where you want to go, even if it means pulling baseboards and tucking it under drywall.
Surprised nobody has a wireless TV router aimed at consumer market.
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