Crap-5 Cabling II: Coax Woes

First off, hi folks. Hope everyone’s doing okay.

Second, if you ever buy a house, get the wiring checked out. In fact, get everything checked out with a fine-tooth comb. If anything looks off, raise hell.

We bought our house just over ten years ago. It was a brand new subdivision. I figured that, at the very least, we wouldn’t have to worry about old, out-of-spec wiring.

Well, turns out that it was the least of our worries, and not in a good way. But, I digress. That’s a story (or stories) for another day.

Over the last two and a half months, I’ve been getting random internet drops.

After countless phone calls, lies, two modem swaps, lies, escalations to “monitor our line”, lies, two technicians “checking the line”, and more lies, we get fed up.

Also, I came across quite a few people in the city complaining about the same thing with no resolution for over a year. Not looking good, and I was like a beaten dog at this point.

I begged my wife to do her best Karen impersonation while I called Rogers (those of you in Canada just muttered “yep, that figures” to yourself) yet again. Guess what? It worked. I think. We got through to some obscure department that no one had ever mentioned before.

They sent out an actual technician with some sense, who seemed to know what he was talking about. He found noise on the line. He even showed me on his meter-thingy.

Turns out that multiple spots in the neighbourhood are dumping noise into the system.

Me included.

That’s right. He found some noise also coming from my house. But, he says that it wasn’t really enough to affect things one way or the other. So, at least the call wasn’t coming from inside the house.

But, he promised that would do an actual escalation to a team that would come out and check each line in the main box for the neighbourhood. Any sources of noise would be disconnected from the internet if they couldn’t contact the home owners and get it sorted out.

Including mine.

He offered to help track down the line noise coming from the house. We found it quite quickly. It was the wall jack for the living room television. He didn’t have to, but he changed the connector for us, and guess what? No more noise. I’m assuming the old connector was Russian cold-war surplus or equivalent.

So, I know that the electrical contractor that our house builder used wasn’t well… the best. More details on that in another story, but you’ve already seen his handiwork in Crap-5 Cabling post that I did. I also know that he worked on all the other houses that were being built. So, not good. I wish that Rogers team all the best when they show up tomorrow and start wondering why every house except mine is giving off line noise…

Take care, folks.

P.S. In fairness to my wife, she was actually pretty polite with them on the phone call.