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The box on the side of the house, legallaty question.
This thread has 15 replies. Displaying all posts.
Post 1 made on Wednesday July 11, 2018 at 20:04
King of typos
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I am wondering who really owns the box and the connections inside said box. The box in question is the cable box where the coax cables from the road, which are underground. And then have a couple splitters inside for different locations inside the house.

Does the home owner legally have a right to those connections since there are splitters inside? Therefore are technically their cables, not the cable company’s.

I ask because my landlord’s cable provider made a visit the other day. Gratefully cleaned up that mess in the box. It was so bad that the box couldn’t close before. Now not only is it closed, but it’s locked. Locked with that locking coax barrel.

Let’s say there were no splitters in there, but just the grounding point. The coax cable leaving the grounding point is still technically the home owners. So the box shall remain unlocked at all times anyways.

This is one of the things I remembered when I was an installer for Comcast. Was the fact we left those boxes unlocked to allow the home owners access whenever.

What does your provoders do in your area? Locked, or unlocked?

KOT
Post 2 made on Wednesday July 11, 2018 at 20:13
InVision Systems
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They are generally unlocked, allowing access but it's still the demarcation point. On one side of the splitter is the service and the other end of the splitter is the "clients house wiring."
Elevate Technologies
Nashville, TN
Post 3 made on Wednesday July 11, 2018 at 20:49
Ernie Gilman
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Demarcation is "the action of fixing the boundary or limits of something" or "a dividing line." Here, the dividing line is between the wiring belonging to the cable company and the wiring belonging to the house. The cable company has no right to deny access of the homeowner to the home's cabling.

Why the demarc? So that if there's a signal problem, the wires can be separated and the fault can be located either on one side, the other, or both... which you can't determine without accessing the demarc.

The cable company has no right to deny the homeowner access to the cable wiring inside his house, so the demarcation point box must be unlocked.
A good answer is easier with a clear question giving the make and model of everything.
"The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." -- G. “Bernie” Shaw
OP | Post 4 made on Thursday July 12, 2018 at 04:36
King of typos
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Ok, that's what I figured. I'll be sure to tell them to remove that lock when they come out again to install other equipment.

Thanks,
KOT
Post 5 made on Thursday July 12, 2018 at 05:15
thecapnredfish
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Ernie. You are correct in everything you wrote except I must disagree with one point. Must remain unlocked. Why? Phone companies lock their side with a security type screw. Then come out with a little pigtail to accessable connections. I think cable being locked has more to do with theft in the analog days. Is power not locked in many locations? Besides homeowners cause themselves and other more problems with HSD service because of ingress when they jack up connections with the Walmart cables and connectors. Back to the cables. You are correct about the wires. They are the customers from demarc on.
OP | Post 6 made on Thursday July 12, 2018 at 08:34
King of typos
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The reason the telephone company can lock theirs up. Is because they have two sections. Their section and home owner section. The home owner section remains unlocked. Company side is locked

For whatever reason, cable companies haven’t done this yet.

KOT
Post 7 made on Thursday July 12, 2018 at 14:02
Audiophiliac
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I know here, you are responsible for the water main from the point where it crosses into your property. If it breaks in your yard, you are on the hook for repairing it. If it breaks in the street, the city foots the bill. If it breaks right on the line, I guess you battle it out. :)

Its different with cable and phone here. If you cut the line in your yard, they will come repair it. Free. Go figure. When I was renting with roommates, the damn dog kept digging up the coax across the back yard. I probably put 3 or 4 F81s in that thing over the couple of years I was there.

All I know is that when there is only a single coax to the demarc point, and cable and dish show up at the same time, it gets entertaining. That day, the cable guy lost. :)
"When I eat, it is the food that is scared." - Ron Swanson
Post 8 made on Thursday July 12, 2018 at 14:48
Ernie Gilman
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On July 12, 2018 at 05:15, thecapnredfish said...
Ernie. You are correct in everything you wrote except I must disagree with one point. Must remain unlocked. Why?

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 cable being locked has more to do with theft in the analog days.

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.

Is power not locked in many locations?

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.

Besides homeowners cause themselves and other more problems with HSD service because of ingress when they jack up connections with the Walmart cables and connectors.

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!

Back to the cables. You are correct about the wires. They are the customer's from demarc on.

And the cable company has no right to lock them up. That's the sense in which I say "must."
A good answer is easier with a clear question giving the make and model of everything.
"The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." -- G. “Bernie” Shaw
Post 9 made on Thursday July 12, 2018 at 15:04
Ernie Gilman
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On July 12, 2018 at 14:02, Audiophiliac said...
I know here, you are responsible for the water main from the point where it crosses into your property. If it breaks in your yard, you are on the hook for repairing it. If it breaks in the street, the city foots the bill. If it breaks right on the line, I guess you battle it out. :)

Recently here in Los Angeles county, a leak occurred in front of a person's house.

Paula Glickstein estimates 100,000 gallons of water by now have flowed from the ruptured pipe connected to her North Hollywood property before she could get the DWP to respond.

She says she called DWP as soon as she noticed the leak, but hit nothing but roadblocks when trying to get permission to cut the roots of the city-owned tree.

Work crews showed up after she contacted Eyewitness News and the story aired over the weekend.

DWP officials say they will not saddle Glickstein with what would be a massive water bill.

Pictures and even sound at [Link: abc7.com]



Its different with cable and phone here. If you cut the line in your yard, they will come repair it. Free. Go figure.

You mean cable and phone handle things differently from one another? Or cable and phone will both repair a line for free, which is different from the water company repairing a pipe?
A good answer is easier with a clear question giving the make and model of everything.
"The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." -- G. “Bernie” Shaw
Post 10 made on Thursday July 12, 2018 at 19:28
internetraver
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[Link: amazon.com]
OP | Post 11 made on Thursday July 12, 2018 at 20:36
King of typos
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Told my landlord about the lock and how she has a right to it and all. She then tells me a couple of years ago a tech had a fit about it being unlocked. “You know your cab,e can be shut off for this being unlocked.” When in fact it was left unlocked by a previous cable tech. (Disclaimer, idk if it was a company guy or contractor.)

Nevertheless, I informed her that the box must remain unlocked by law and such. And that I would tell the next guy to leave it unlocked. If they so insist leaving it locked. Then I’ll threaten them with a electrician bill for retiring the house. See how far that’ll get me. Ha

KOT
Post 12 made on Thursday July 12, 2018 at 20:53
Trunk-Slammer -Supreme
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Had a "cable guy" come out to my MIL's house as her internet was working very sporadically.

It was a hilarious nightmare, especially when the second made all sorts of claims about what was happening, and the third guy started running with a line os BS so deep it was hard not to laugh in his face.


Third guy placed a barrel lock on the enclosure, then went to his truck to write up his report.

I walked to his truck, just before he was going to leave, and handed the "lock" back to him.

The look on his face was priceless!
Post 13 made on Thursday July 12, 2018 at 21:00
Ernie Gilman
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On July 12, 2018 at 20:53, Trunk-Slammer -Supreme said...
Had a "cable guy" come out to my MIL's...

Omigod, I read that wrong the first time I glanced at it!
A good answer is easier with a clear question giving the make and model of everything.
"The biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." -- G. “Bernie” Shaw
OP | Post 14 made on Thursday July 12, 2018 at 21:19
King of typos
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I forgot to mentioned, this area just got rid of analog TV with in the last 6 months. Which happened a month or two after Atlantic Broadband took over Metrocast.

KOT
Post 15 made on Friday July 13, 2018 at 05:21
thecapnredfish
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Ernie. The reason for not having a locked section is all of the cable that is attached to the house is the customers. From the P-hook to the CPE. If you want a drop removed it’s cut before it hits the P-hook. Rest is left. Stand by my reason for locking was days of stealing analog. However the locking tool is easily bought.
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