...12 days ago my Samsung STB died - so quick call to help line on a Sunday evening and an engineer was booked for Tuesday. Good so far...
Turns up Tuesday morning with a PACE box , gets the TV going but no broadband , 30 mins and lots of calls later and the engineer tells me - will be fixed in 2 hours expect a call to power the box up and down and all will be well.... (if I recall rightly the older Pace boxes could only cope with 1 or 2Mb and they had to swap my old Pace for a Samsung to get me to 4Mb - so no surprise to me)
He suggests I switch to a cable modem - so I call up and arrange an installation for the first available date - 9 days later - the following Thursday.
Back to Tuesday I phone help line 6 hours later and get told , oh no the STB problem is with Level 2 , make that a 2 day turn around....
2 days later phone help line get a pleasant lady who says no idea when it will be fixed as they can't talk to L2 , I have more chance of the cable modem being installed before L2 fix the STB, so she refunds me my service charges...
Surprise surprise following Monday , wife gets a call power the STB on off and hey presto its working but at 2Mb (what a surprise) ...another call to sort out the provisioning password and I am up and running..
Thursday engineer installs modem , tells me it will all be working in 2 hours ... where have I heard that before. 4 hours later and still no IP address from the cable modem but the STB is still working connected to my router.
Phone helpline tell them no cable modem but STB is working - I get taken thru ridiculous set of diagnostics and then told please contact my manufacturer - point out that the PC works on the STB cable so it must be their problem - so they book an engineer to swap out the modem.
This evening I tried reconnecting the cable modem - no luck - Then I spot that the cable modem is flashing its recv light every time I download from the web using the STB....
Alarm bells ring they must be using the same piece of wet string...
Switch of set top box , connect cable modem hey presto I now have an IP address and a provisioning screen... It doesn't work but progress - another call to help line to fix the 203 error and they re-register the modem - and finally I have cable modem working back at 4Mb....
12 days and lots of calls later I have normal BB service resumed
... but I have not had the courage to turn the STB back on yet...
So the help line scripts obviously can not cope with moving broadband from the STB to cable modem - the STB will hog the line even after it has been told no service (as long a there is something connected , ie my router)
Morale you have to switch of the STB to get the modem working...
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