Incompetent cable technicians who use two-way cable splitters in places where they should use inline couplers deserve to be forced to use 56k dialup for the remainder of their natural lives.
In other news, I positively despise drop/suspended/tile/whateveryouwanttocallthem ceilings – sure, in this case, it let me fix this particular frak-up, but I still hate them.
When I did cable tech support I used to see this problem all the time. Splitters with unused terminals can introduce all kinds of noise into the line, not to mention that two-way splitters attenuate the cable signal by 3dB whether something’s plugged into every port or not.
And, unfortunately, modern tech is not going to cure this stupidity, what with ethernet switches/routers not caring how many wires are plugged into how many plugs, and chugging merrily along regardless. People see that, think the same thing applies to everything (when the very basic root of both – digital signals versus analog – are not at all equivalent), and act accordingly.
Correcting this splitter and truncating the wire by about 20 feet doubled our downstream available power level, and I will grant that we do run a splitter at the TV (for the TV, TiVo, modem, and voice modem), but at least it is powered (and a pass-through, for the modem’s sake).
I used to teach the lab sections of the electromagnetic fields class when I was an undergraduate (a junior level, four hour course). My estimate is that about 80% of the students who took the course could not understand that a transmission line was more than just a pair of wires. Add in balanced vs. unbalanced operation, signal reflection, and line termination, and it was like teaching Greek to a turtle.
So, there’s no hope. Just fix the headaches as you find them.
Well, you are starting to reach the limits of my own personal knowledge on the topic, but that is merely because I never really studied the topic that far in depth, and just lack the specific information. That said, I knew more than a few people of the type you describe in college… and some of them are probably running around plugging in wires for cable companies today.
And, really, the applied side of these things is not difficult – even if you do not grasp the theory of it, learning that randomly splitting things is bad is not exactly hard…
random quotes
“Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.” by Lazarus Long
When I did cable tech support I used to see this problem all the time. Splitters with unused terminals can introduce all kinds of noise into the line, not to mention that two-way splitters attenuate the cable signal by 3dB whether something’s plugged into every port or not.
And, unfortunately, modern tech is not going to cure this stupidity, what with ethernet switches/routers not caring how many wires are plugged into how many plugs, and chugging merrily along regardless. People see that, think the same thing applies to everything (when the very basic root of both – digital signals versus analog – are not at all equivalent), and act accordingly.
Correcting this splitter and truncating the wire by about 20 feet doubled our downstream available power level, and I will grant that we do run a splitter at the TV (for the TV, TiVo, modem, and voice modem), but at least it is powered (and a pass-through, for the modem’s sake).
It is worse than you think.
I used to teach the lab sections of the electromagnetic fields class when I was an undergraduate (a junior level, four hour course). My estimate is that about 80% of the students who took the course could not understand that a transmission line was more than just a pair of wires. Add in balanced vs. unbalanced operation, signal reflection, and line termination, and it was like teaching Greek to a turtle.
So, there’s no hope. Just fix the headaches as you find them.
Well, you are starting to reach the limits of my own personal knowledge on the topic, but that is merely because I never really studied the topic that far in depth, and just lack the specific information. That said, I knew more than a few people of the type you describe in college… and some of them are probably running around plugging in wires for cable companies today.
And, really, the applied side of these things is not difficult – even if you do not grasp the theory of it, learning that randomly splitting things is bad is not exactly hard…