[mythtv-users] Comcast CableCard Info

[Eric Sharkey]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 6:44 PM, Gary Buhrmaster
<gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 22:12, Eric Sharkey <eric at lisaneric.org> wrote:
> I am not trying to give Comcast an out, but my guess
> is that the recent upsurge in CC activations (thank you
> Ceton and SiliconDust) has simply resulted in a
> substantial increase in requests, with staff not
> knowing how to do the right thing (the CSRs are
> trained to answer the types of questions and do the
> procedures they are likely to get, and CC activation
> simply wasn't something they had enough experience
> with to reliably get right;

They aren't prepared for this at all.  Really, there should be no need
to talk to a CSR unless something goes wrong.  The number of times I
had to read the card serial number, data id, host id, and card id over
the phone was ridiculous and error prone (Did he just say P as in Paul
or B as in ball?)  They should have a web form for this where the
customer can just type the numbers in and see what's being typed, and
it should send the standard init signal without human interaction.
How hard would it be to set this up?  Didn't they know this was
coming?

I'm sure they'll get something like this up eventually, but it doesn't
make sense the way they're doing it now.

But ultimately, I blame Cable Labs the most.  The system should have
been designed so that the appliance can do all of this automatically.
Comcast should know the serial number and card id for the card
already.  They log that and associate it with the customer account
when they give them out.  The card should have some small flash memory
which can be programmed with information needed for the appliance to
send out the host id and such using a standard protocol and the
customer experience really should be "put the card in and turn it on".

Eric