The last two lines of this post say it all.

I thought it was pretty obvious. Sorry, but you asked for this answer.

All I am saying, is give peace a cha.... oops, sorry, wrong song.
All I am saying is that the cable company does not have the right to lock up the connectors on the wires that go into the house from the box.

Let me get a detail out of the way: every time any utility has "locked" something, there has been no actual lock. It's not hard to get into the locked section of a phone demarc box using the right pair of needle-nosed pliers. High voltage power boxes are usually "locked" with a piece of steel wire and a "seal" that can only prove there has been no tampering. We're custom installers. We build stuff. Hell, we make tools! We can figure out how to defeat all of this stuff. We now resume pretending that "locked" means "locked."


Notice some things about the phone company box.
First, the phone company supplies it to control how their wires are protected from vandalism. Often, amateur utility wiring or rewiring amounts to vandalism.

Second, it has the end of a drop cable in it. This can easily be the end of a hundred foot aerial run of a 6-pair drop cable coming from the middle of a hundred foot span between two telephone poles (that's 150 feet plus slack at the ends), terminating in a splice box at the pole that has hundreds of conductors in it.

If the subscriber end of such a wire is reachable by the client, there will be times when someone screws with it and makes the wire too short to connect to the phone box, or creates some other problem. (It is the nature of people to mess things up when they don't know that they don't know what should be done.) Such an occurrence would require a whole new drop, at least an hour's work by one, maybe two techs, to repair.

Those wire ends should be locked up where the client cannot get to them. Lock 'em up right now!

In my area, to the right of the locked section there is an RJ11 for each active pair of phone wires. There's also a short pigtail that goes to screw terminals. The wires going into the house connect to these screw terminals.

That RJ11 is the point of demarcation. Problem on the line? Pop the RJ11 out of the jack and the entire world inside the house is instantly separated from the entire world between the phone company switch and the RJ11. If there was, say, static on the line, one can then monitor the line without any chance of problems in the house causing the static. One can troubleshoot the house wiring without any possible contribution to the problem from the phone company wiring. One simple disconnect and hours of troubleshooting are eliminated because the universe has been divided between phone-company-caused problems and house-wiring-caused problems.

But cable boxes only have one section. That section has the cable company's drop wire and it has the homeowner's cables that go into the house. The cable company has every right to lock away the part of the wiring that connects directly to their equipment. We've seen filters, attenuators, and bandstops over the years. The homeowner has no right to mess with them and the best way to accomplish that is to lock them away.

But cable boxes are not made like phone boxes. There is no locked-up incoming section with all the crap in it that the cable company can put on their end of things, with a little pigtail coming out of it that connects in an unlocked section to the house wiring. If you lock up the cable company wiring, which is totally allowable, you lock up the client's house wiring, which you (the cable company) have no right to do.

So until the cable company decides to provide boxes that let them lock up their side of stuff, they have no right to lock away any of it, since that locks away the client's property.


I think you're right, in that bandstops were used to stop some programming from entering the house. This does not, however, give the cable company the right to lock away the legitimate connections of the house wiring to the splitters etc that the cable company has provided. That is, the cable company never actually had the right to do this.


My experience is in the Los Angeles area.
One can remove a metal cover from the box that contains the circuit breakers. Every place upstream from this has a seal on it. That seal cannot keep people out. It cannot even prove whether someone has accessed the wiring behind it. It can only prove, if it is intact, whether nobody has tampered with things behind it.  This is "locked" within the definition I gave at the start of this term paper.


Assuming HSD isn't Hadron String Dynamics or Honestly Significant Difference, but High Speed Data...
Saying "because of ingress" is a good attempt to define the problems that might arise, but it is no more helpful, really, than the guy who says the car won't start because there's a short in the Turbo Encabulator. If there were a short in the encabulator, the frammis wouldn't properly joculate against the scramming block. And we know what kind of problems that brings about!


And the cable company has no right to lock them up. That's the sense in which I say "must."