Altice USA is upgrading the firmware powering its much-promoted Altice One set-top box to introduce new functionality and integrate popular web services into the viewing experience.

Altice One v2.0 is rolling out to about 200,000 customers that have the advanced box. Among the new features:

• Recorded DVR content stored in the cloud can now be played back anywhere using the Altice One mobile app.
• YouTube Kids and a variety of streaming services will enhance viewing options beyond YouTube, Netflix, and a few other supported streaming services.
• More 4K content will be available, including Premier League soccer, available on channel 200.
• Remote control voice search will be available for the YouTube app.
• Show restart feature expanding to 20 extra channels, including A&E, History Channel, Lifetime, Viceland, Fox News, Fox Sports 1, FX and National Geographic.

The Altice One box, which carries a higher rental fee than traditional cable set-top boxes, has now been rolled out to about 80% of its Cablevision/Optimum and Suddenlink service areas. But only a minority of subscribers choose the box, and it gets poor reviews from customers because of bugs and other unexpected behavior.

Altice One v2.0 promotional video, courtesy of Altice. (0:30)

Odorous House Ants in splice tray (Image: Rainbow Tech)

Ants going about their daily routine have grown increasingly frustrated with the presence of underground optical cables and other telecommunications equipment including lawn pedestals and terminating boxes and have become a growing problem for telecom companies that can blame local outages on their activities.

In the last month, Frontier, Windstream, AT&T, and Verizon all suffered outages directly attributed to insect activity. In most cases, the damage is unintentional — the insects use enclosed spaces like lawn pedestals and equipment cabinets as a handy home. Material brought into the colony can overheat equipment when it blocks air vents, increased moisture from the insects can corrode or compromise sensitive electronics, and insect attempts to push wiring out of the way can ruin optical cables.

Stop the Cap! reader Geoff Fielder found his entire neighborhood missing U-verse service last month and learned ants had infested the neighborhood’s fiber-copper junction box and corroded some of the equipment contained inside.

“When the technician opened the box, half the neighborhood could hear him screaming,” Fletcher said. “He made it quite plain he didn’t like ants. His partner arrived with a spray can in hand and knocked down most of them and encouraged the others to retreat. The damage was significant and they were surprised it happened so quickly because AT&T technicians tend to visit equipment boxes regularly when they connect new customers.”

It took most of the afternoon to repair the damage and bring the neighborhood back online.

Earlier this summer, Verizon FiOS user Paul McNamara, news editor of Network World, reported ants had destroyed the fiber optic cable bringing him service. Five years earlier, ants caused havoc when they colonized a utility junction box on a pole across the street. In both cases, they brought Verizon’s fiber network to its knees for McNamara.

“When the Verizon technician opened the box it was filled with hundreds of ants (I had actually forgotten about the earlier ant episode, but he clearly expected them to be there),” McNamara wrote in a blog post. “And when he shooed away enough of the critters to get a look inside, the red glow of a stripped fiber optic cable was clearly visible.”

The technician believed the ants were attracted to a liquid jelly used inside the cable’s casing.

Ant damage to an optical fiber cable (Image: Draka)

Draka, an optical fiber supplier dealing with complaints about insect damage, reports the ants it encounters are not seeking out optical cables. They just don’t appreciate when those cables get in their way.

The company ran test ant farms where they intentionally placed optical fiber cables in proximity to the colonizing ants. They were relieved to discover the ants didn’t target their brand of cable specifically — they attacked them all equally. This problem may require expert assistance; contact Marietta OH pest control companies to help you.

“Fibers from all four suppliers were found to be damaged by the activities of the ants in the farms,” Draka wrote in its study. “The ants did not preferentially attack Draka fiber in the competitor fiber farms, but rather they did damage to fibers from all vendors.”

Some ant species are less tolerant of cables than others. Among the nastiest are the Red, Western, and California Harvester Ants, found mostly west of the Mississippi. They dig ant galleries as deep as nine feet and have little tolerance for any underground cables they meet.

“It was concluded that the harvester ants often attempt to push aside any optical fiber they encounter if the fiber is in the way of their work,” Draka reported. “It was observed that they sometimes moved the fibers when they were in the way, but they were not seen trying to eat the coating or attacking the fiber.”

They needn’t do either to cause damage. The body parts they use to shove cables aside are capable of creating significant damage, starting with stripping the color off the cable and eventually destroying insulation straight down to the glass fiber itself.

Other ant species are also capable of causing indirect damage by their presence. Ant waste is often corrosive and a long-established colony can do significant damage to equipment cabinets.

The neighborhood bad boy, ready to chew.

Technicians assigned to dealing with insect-related outages encounter more than just ants, however. These insects often set up home inside little-accessed boxes:

• Black Widow Spiders
• Brown Recluse Spiders
• Crickets
• Fleas
• Millipedes
• Roaches
• Scorpions
• Silverfish
• Sowbugs
• Ticks
• Waterbugs

Rainbow Technology, a major supplier of insect and rodent control measures to utility companies, says a fast response can make a real difference. Rainbow said the worst offenders are five types of ants that have a bad reputation with utility companies: harvester ants, odorous house ants, Argentine ants, carpenter ants and fire ants. They have been implicated in service outages in California, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Texas.

Rodents, especially squirrels, also remain constant hazards everywhere – especially to overhead wiring. They need to wear down constantly growing teeth and utility cables are a perennial favorite. They typically stop gnawing after the insulation has been stripped off cable television or telephone wiring. They will stop gnawing for a different reason if they chew on electrical cables. So for those who want to banish them in their vicinity, they can now do so thanks to services like animal control.

A Verizon Wireless upgrade that was supposed to fix bugs and introduce multi-screen, multi-window multitasking and new camera and image-related features to the popular Samsung Galaxy S3 instead has killed the phone’s 4G performance and dramatically decreased battery life. There are also reports some Verizon Wireless customers are finding themselves auto-enrolled in an unwanted caller ID with name add-on feature ($2.99/month) that leaves the phone connected to 3G or 4G service even when using Wi-Fi.

It was not an auspicious moment for Big Red, never fast with phone updates, particularly when Sprint customers earlier received a similar upgrade with no ill-effects.

Your editor spent two days last week attempting to mitigate Verizon’s mistakes, including several hours inside multiple Verizon Wireless store locations and talking to their national customer support center. In the end, it resulted in not one, but two factory refurbished phone exchanges and a $20 service credit for data service effectively disabled by a firmware upgrade.

This nightmare has a name: JZO54K.I535VRBMD3 — a software update so plagued with bugs, Verizon reportedly pulled it over the weekend after customers complained it ruined 4G wireless data service, along with the phone’s performance. The 128MB update has been available for about a week for those regularly checking their phones for software updates, and some customers began being prompted to install it last Friday.

So how can you tell if you are affected? Choose Settings -> About Device and check the “Build Number” visible at the bottom of the screen. If it ends in VRBMD3, you may be impacted. Not every customer is reporting problems, which may mean some phones are not affected or the performance degradation has been dismissed as a temporary reception problem or has only subtly affected low-bandwidth applications and has gone unnoticed.

Symptoms

1. Your wireless data signal strength meter on the phone suddenly shows much poorer reception than before the update;
2. Your battery life has declined significantly and the battery is very warm to the touch;
3. You have trouble loading web pages or accessing multimedia content with long buffering pauses or sudden loss of reception in places where signals used to be adequate;
4. Messaging services seem unstable with frequent disconnects;
5. Your phone drops from 4G to 3G service and stays connected at 3G (or less) speeds until you reset the phone;
6. Using “Speed Test” apps result in “Network Communication Issue” errors or extremely long test times with very high ping rates, very slow/inconsistent download speeds, and trouble measuring upload speeds;
7. You find icons for both Wi-Fi and 3G or 4G wireless service at the top of your phone at the same time;
8. You suddenly find your account billed for Caller ID plus Name service at $2.99 a month, despite not requesting this service.

Phillip “Verizon turned my 4G phone into a 1G phone” Dampier

The more of these symptoms you experience, the greater the chance Verizon’s update for the S3 has temporarily left your phone a shadow of its former self.

Verizon officially recognized the wireless connectivity problem May 31 when it released an internal bulletin acknowledging the software update is responsible. The company claims it has since stopped sending it out to S3 owners (we have not been able to confirm this ourselves).

Verizon blames Samsung for the defective update. Samsung blames Verizon, telling customers software upgrades are vetted, approved, and distributed exclusively by Verizon. Customers are left over a barrel until one or both companies assume responsibility and issue corrected firmware, which could take weeks.

Verizon Wireless’ technical support told Stop the Cap! the phone’s firmware is at the heart of the problem, and although it can sometimes get phones to be more tolerant of the software update, no number of factory resets, SIM card refreshes or replacements, or settings changes will fully correct the problem. Many customers can expect continued degraded 4G performance comparable to 3G speeds (or much worse) either because of slowed performance or an unstable connection until a fix is available.

The problem with multiple icons for both Wi-Fi and 3G or 4G service has to do with a single new app Verizon has forced on their customers. “Caller ID plus Name” was added to your app list in the latest update and is responsible for the dual data connections and reported instances of customers being auto-enrolled and billed for the service, even if they never specifically ran the app.

Bloatware is bad enough, but badly performing forced apps are worse. You can permanently disable the offending app and solve the double icon problem with this simple fix:

Enter Settings -> Application Manager, and select the “All” applications tab along the top. Find “Caller ID plus Name” in the list, select it, and you will see a button to “disable” the app. This may not resolve the problem of the app auto-enrolling you for a paid feature that costs $2.99 a month, so watch your bill.

Trouble

Affected customers with degraded service have several options:

1. If your phone is still under warranty, and most Galaxy S3 phones are, you can request a free handset replacement. Since Verizon created the problem, ask for a free shipping upgrade to overnight FedEx delivery. Your refurbished phone will arrive without a battery, SIM card, or back cover. Use the ones included with your original phone and your replacement handset should automatically activate. Immediately after powering up, your phone will offer a series of two or three Verizon firmware updates that you can defer. Until it can be verified Verizon has stopped pushing the defective update to customers, we recommend you avoid performing these firmware updates. If you don’t, and Verizon pushes the defective update to your replacement phone, it will likely perform no better than your original;
2. Request service credit for degraded/lost data service. Remember to also request credit, if applicable, for any Mobile Hotspot option, GPS travel, or other Verizon add-on that depends on a stable data network connection;
3. Indicate your displeasure that Verizon did not more thoroughly test the update before pushing it on customers.

Here are the suggested fixes Verizon may attempt on your phone, but we do not believe they correct the underlying problem — only updated software will:

• Removing the battery and “Refreshing/replacing the SIM card” may help refresh roaming rules or possibly correct a corrupted SIM card. Some customers reported this helped them get back data service they completely lost after the update, so it might help in certain cases, but probably will not correct the unstable 4G connection;
• Clearing the cache and cookies from the web browser is unlikely to have any effect on this problem;
• Changing the Mobile Networks setting to/from “Global” to “LTE/CDMA.” A few customers reported they got back some data service after toggling these options. The default on the Samsung Galaxy S3 running firmware from last fall was (and still remains) Global. We suspect the switch toggles the radio off and on, forcing a reconnect, which can bring back a 4G connection after the phone downshifts to 3G. But we don’t believe this will correct the speed/stability problem;
• A “factory reset” is frankly a waste of time. This will leave your phone with the same defective firmware. If you had symptoms before, you will likely still have them after resetting your phone.

If you are reluctant to part with your phone and avail yourself of any option other than requesting a service credit while Samsung and Verizon point fingers over who is responsible and and when a fix will arrive, you can make life with your phone a bit easier with these tips:

1. Stay on Wi-Fi when possible. Wi-Fi data performance was not affected by this software update;
2. Expect 30-40% reduced battery life. We suspect this (and the hot battery) is caused by the phone trying to deal with unstable 4G service, as if it was in a fringe reception zone. Keep a charger handy;
3. Try and get your phone to downshift to 3G by finding a weak reception spot (like a basement) and hope the phone drops (and remains) on 3G until it is rebooted. It appears 3G data speeds are not affected by the software bug;
4. Expect problems when using high bandwidth applications on Verizon’s LTE 4G service. We found video next to impossible to view on 4G, but audio streaming did seem to perform at lower bit rates.

Expect web browsing on 4G to be problematic on complex web pages, which may load incompletely. Try and do your browsing on mobile versions of websites or wait until you can find Wi-Fi.

An Illinois family’s home is now infested by roaches, and the Aurora resident is blaming Comcast’s reportedly bug-infested set top box for the problem. Read up about these pest facts that are not commonly know so you’ll know how to deal with them.

Antonio Muñoz recently signed up for Comcast cable service, but tells the Beacon News cockroaches began crawling out of the refurbished cable box installed in his parents’ room.

In addition to the roaches he has collected in a plastic bag to show the cable operator, the Muñoz family has now seen several of the bugs running loose around the home.

Muñoz is upset with the cable company for dragging their feet on replacing the infested equipment.  He’s since sealed the box in question and dropped it off at Comcast’s local cable store.  But the cable company refused to exchange it with a new box until a technician could be sent to the Muñoz home.

“Given the rigorous quality control processes we have in place, it’s difficult to say exactly what happened,” a Comcast representative said. “As our goal is to do right by our customers, our immediate focus is to resolve the issue to Mr. Muñoz’s satisfaction.”

It’s not the first time Comcast has faced allegations of roach-infested equipment, prompting more rigorous and Detailed pest removal inspections to ensure customer safety and hygiene.

More than a dozen current and former employees of a Comcast facility on Chicago’s South Side are part of a federal class-action lawsuit filed last month alleging racial discrimination and a hostile, bug-infested work environment.

The suit claims Comcast management ordered technicians to install equipment in customer homes regardless if it was defective or infested by vermin.

The plaintiffs claim Comcast facilities are plagued not only with roaches but also rats.  Some supervisors are accused of telling some Comcast workers that equipment given to African American employees would be stolen, and there was little reason to provide those installers with a complete set of installer tools.

Most cable equipment is recycled and re-used as customers turn in equipment.  Cable operators routinely refurbish and test equipment before it is put back into service.  But cable equipment can offer an inviting home for invading insects or small rodents.  Customers receiving obviously used equipment should inspect it carefully for plant debris, dead insects, or points of potential entry for unwelcome visitors before allowing the installer to leave.

The Muñoz family has since received a new box, but no word if the special visitors that arrived in the original equipment have been effectively evicted.

The performance doesn't match the promise.

Time Warner Cable took a fine free iPad app allowing authenticated cable TV customers to watch dozens of national cable networks and turned it into a complete disaster in its latest upgrade, now dubbed TWCable TV App for iPad.

Under no circumstances should you consider running this until the inexcusable bugs are worked out in a future release.

We tried this app at Stop the Cap! HQ last evening and ran into immediate problems — troubles shared by the majority of app users who took the time to bottom rate the app in Apple’s App Store.

1. On several attempts, the application claimed we were running a modified version of the Apple iPad 2’s basic software.  While “jailbreaking” iPad to improve the user experience is important for some, it has never been for us, and we are running an unmodified original firmware version of iPad 2.  But you can’t tell that to Time Warner Cable — the app will refuse to run when this error message displays.
2. When we were able to launch the application, we found the expanded channel lineup, which now includes around 100 national cable networks enticing… if we could manage to watch any of them.  Within two minutes of launching any channel, we found a frozen, unrecoverable picture.  The only way to restore viewing was to exit the channel and start again.  It left things completely unwatchable.  A few dozen channels you can watch or 100 you cannot watch?  This was not an improvement.
3. The “interactive program guide” addition allows users to see program listings for up to 7 days. Customers can also configure the guide to display only their favorite channels, in order to avoid scrolling through the entire channel line-up.  That last feature is essential — it will take you 7 days of eternal tedium to scroll through hundreds of channels looking for something to actually watch.  Cable companies need to abandon the traditional “program guide” and deliver an improved service that answers this basic question: what do YOU want to watch.  If I am in the mood for mysteries, show me what I can see.  If I want one of those cheap “true crime” documentaries, let me select from a seedy list of those shows either on now or upcoming.  It no longer matters what is showing on each channel at any time.  We want program content, not a recitation of upcoming programming on the Yarn Channel.
4. The ability to tune the set-top box from within the new guide in the app. Simply tap on a network logo within the iPad program guide or the “watch on TV” button within the program description to tune directly to the channel.  Playing around with this feature only showed one of my set top boxes — the DVR in the living room.  The one in the bedroom is apparently the bad child you want to forget.  It doesn’t show up at all.  This feature turns your iPad into a glorified remote control.  Its most useful function is to annoy your family as you change channels from another room.  Sick and tired of your significant other watching Design on a Dime when you could be watching Columbo?  Just change the channel on them.  Again and again.
5. The new app theoretically allows you to remotely manage your DVR recordings.  I say ‘theoretically’ because it worked only inconsistently.  I repeatedly found recordings I wanted to “manage” were completely unmanageable with the app, exiting with an error message.

Time Warner’s control freak mentality over jailbroken versions of iPad no doubt deals with their nightmare scenario: you might be an “unauthenticated” cable cord cutter trying to watch their networks for free, or even worse, record them for later viewing.  It took all of a few hours for iPad enthusiasts to outwit the cable company and work around this roadblock.

Perhaps it’s wrong to complain loudly about a free app like this, but with all of the negative reviews and basic functionality problems, one wonders who beta tested this thing?