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Saturday, December 17, 2022

Should be renamed "Hotmess"

 We finally got our Hotwire installation done and are no longer Comcast customers. 

Which means, I can't say "Comcast sucks!!!!!!!!!!!" when we have problems. I now have to remember to say "F*ck1ng Hotwire Sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!";because trust me, we aren't a full week in, and I'm already like "eff this ship". 

Let me back track and start from somewhat of a beginning. 

The community I live in, has a ten year Comcast contract. The ten years are up come January 2023 and the (non paid, all volunteer, resident) master board members tried to see what was out there for newer / better service. They started this search two years ago and even paid someone to dig deeper. 

We had options (of the ones that kept popping up with the person we were paying big money for): 
- Stay with Comcast and get a new rate, plus the possibility of fiber optics.
- Go with a new to Florida company called Bluestream and get a different rate (plus fiber optics)
- Go with a company called Hotwire, and it's not the travel agency. Plus we'd get fiber optics and a different rate. 

The board decided to look into these three companies more and see what was being offered. 

Oh, I have to add, I think the first original option (for those who moved in to this place when it was brand spanking new in 2004), had CenturyLink because a few OGs we know, have CenturyLink products still. At some point, one of the master board iterations went to Comcast for a better deal. This was before my mom and I moved in. 

So the board looked into the options plus others and decided to see what else might pop up, as the contract was expiring in two years from when they started looking. 

Speed up to last year and they started looking again. 

While the main options of companies were still around, the board polled the audience (they sent a survey out to the residents on what they'd want).

Questions / wants include:
- TV
- Internet
- Telephone
- Nothing.

Lots of people do different things in this community, and where it's 4 parcels in one package (3 groups of houses, 1 group of condos), everyone's needs are not the same. Especially after the pandemic hit and people were home more (kids, workers, etcetera), they realized what they had either worked or didn't work for them. 

With each new option of service provider, each came with different tiers depending on what you want over all from the company, to then offer to the community, even from a price stand point, before you offer TV, Internet and Phone. 

Comcast still offered cable (coax wire) plus they are starting to do fiber optics. There are three different tiers with them for wiring options and each come with (yet another) ten year contract. Depending on what you choose, one is more or less than the other in pricing. With the fiber, they'd have to do a lot of digging on / in the ground to lay the new wires because they can't use their old copper cables.

Bluestream is all fiber optics. They would have to dig no matter what. I saw this company do their work first hand, as they went into the place I last worked at. It was a mess - all the trenches built and how they had to string wires on and in the buildings. There was some challenges with it, and it was frustrating for the people. However, the ten year contract my community would get, would have price tiers as well. 

Hotwire is strictly fiber optics but they attach to the old coax copper cables within the community. They would only need to do minimal trenching to get their own wires through the community since they can attach to what each residence already has.  Although they have different paying tiers, they were the overall cheapest. 

People chose wisely for what they wanted, with the survey. Everyone chose accordingly, and less than 1% over all chose Hotwire. 

In the end, the board this year decided to go with the less favorable and very little online presence, Hotwire. 

I have to add here, that I'm taking some liberty in paraphrasing a lot of what the companies have to offer. I remember the options being Comcast, Bluestream and Hotwire and everyone offering different opportunities of packages, and the board didn't want to take advice of the people who would make the best of what they were getting. 

The process of Hotwire started. Lots of town hall meetings, lots of questions. Very little solid answers. We were starting to get sold on a company that would have no real answers or fixes for what would transpire once installation began.

As they started rolling out the wiring and people started getting connected, yes, there were plenty of meetings. But, in all the meetings not all the questions could be answered. People were playing the finger pointing game, and with a representative from the company attempting to answer questions and make comments of their own, we were given convoluted stories. 

The first group of people to get TV and internet were the guinea pigs. Some of the homes were told their televisions were not compatible with the Hotwire system, and the household needed updated TVs. Part of the reasoning was Hotwire relies on Smart TV sets and not everyone had them. Plus, everything is wireless that the company provides. Which means whatever you have for devices, needs to have Wi-Fi access to work. 

Shit.

More people got hooked up and had other problems. The social media apps (Facebook, Nextdoor) were slammed with negative comments. The board screwed the people because they didn't want to deal with Comcast anymore. 

When we got our sales consultation, I happened to have been home. My mother and I sat, in our house, with the sales guy, asking loads of questions. 

- Can we still use our streaming boxes (Roku, Apple TV)? 
Yes

- Do we get a Hotwire email address?
No

- What do we do about our Comcast email address?
You get to keep it because your board has made a deal with Hotwire and Comcast to allow you to keep the email, so long as you sign in to it at least once every three months

- Can I use the Comcast email on my Roku apps? I have things like FX, TLC and other subscription apps on it, that need the Comcast verification to work
As long as you keep the Comcast email active, things will work. But you don't need to use those anymore because you can log into the box we provide you.

- Can we still use the hockey puck (the one ye shall not name because she will wake up)?
Yes. 

- Can we still use the DVD player and have it hooked to the cable box so we can record shows or movies to DVD?
Yes

- Will our printers work on this new network, as they run on the 2.4 band?
Yes

- You say it's one price for whatever the speed is. Can you guarantee that? (come to find out, we were paying $99 a month to Comcast for "Superfast speed" - 800mbps and only getting 200).
Yes, even though you don't technically get what is contracted. Everything takes up certain amounts of speed, so you're going to get as close to the contracted speed as possible. 

- Will there be pixelation on the television when we are watching live programming?
No. Because that deals with internal cable wiring and Hotwire doesn't deal with that.

- Can we keep our current phone number?
Yes.

The questions went on, and he kept explaining more and more. 

Including the fact that everything is wireless. Which means they put their own special fiber box in our house, then from there, hook up a modem and two Wi-Fi extenders. We can have the extenders anywhere we want, but we don't want them together. It should be in each end of the house, so we get a better overall coverage. 

I think that was it for devices. Plans range from the basic tier, which is what the community "pays" for (500 speed). Next tier is the 1GB speed (with a set price for 2 years as an intro rate and then years 3-10 are five bucks more a year). Final Tier is something else with another price point. I forget what it all was, but I know it wasn't more than a gig of speed. You just got better television options. 

After talking it over, and the sales guy explaining that with everything running in the house, you really need the 1gig service. For the price we'd pay, plus the television stations we'd get, the middle of the road gig service is plenty fast. Add the phone service, and we'd pay less than 80 bucks after tax, a month. Versus over $150 a month with Comcast and we don't get great service right now. 

So we accepted that plan. Asked more questions, signed the contract, created an install date. 

Couple weeks later, more town hall meetings, more people griping (but not to the board), we have our install on Tuesday. 

What should have been only a few hours, turned out to be just over 6. 

I should have taken the day off, but I didn't. So my mom was texting me updates as the chaos was happening. 

First, one of the install techs she requested, didn't show up. She was told this guy was amazing, because some of her friends had him as their installer. He explained things, shifted things, made sure things worked. 

Well, he had orders for next door, not us. Considering he walked in our house nor realizing he was in the wrong unit, and took a look around. Said everything he sees is wrong - phone lines, placement of the fiber box, his paperwork. Come to find out, another group of installers were on his toes, coming in our driveway. They were coming to us. He was at the wrong house. 

So off he goes next door and in comes the other people to do the work. Which starts to kick the ball down the hill. 

The new group didn't have all the equipment they needed, so someone had to go somewhere and get it. Half hour later, they have what they need, but need to have access to another electrical box. They need to move a free standing cabinet. My mother says no, as moving it where they want blocks access to the electrical box. They said they are out of invisible wire and moving it behind the cabinet is the best option. My mother insisted they make it work as it is. 

Well, they made it work, and it looks like a shit storm of a mess.

In the first picture, because we chose to have a house phone, they are using a small phone wire to connect from the old Greyfox box (which is all the coax stuff for Comcast) and plugged it into the Nokia modem. So from left: an empty surge protector (ours, that they refused to use), some other electrical box we don't know what it is, the Greyfox Comcast box, Hotwire's Nokia modem, one of 2 Eero mesh extenders. 

In the second picture, you see the whole wall. To the right of the picture, it's cut off, but it's the free standing cabinet they wanted to move to block the big grey electrical box (the panel of the buttons you press to turn off or on everything in the house if it flips). Don't mind our bulletin board, as this is the laundry room. But if you look on the bottom of the picture - in the middle of the bulletin board and big electrical panel, you'll see a white wire running down the wall and plugged into a small box. That's their fiber optic box. 

Which could have gone anywhere, because talking to neighbor friends, no one's room looks like ours. Everything is not as crowded and things are hidden. 

My mom is super mad, because it looks ugly. With the Comcast surfboard or XFi box, it was 1 simple box in our guest room, on an armoire. Nice and neat. With the Hotwire boxes, it's too many things together in one space where it's already overcrowded. This isn't a NYC subway car. This is a laundry room. 

But what is she to do? They stapled, velcro'd, zip tied and whatever else shy of Gorilla glued everything to the wall. 

It came down to going to each room to unhook old boxes and put in new. 
- Guest room: Subtraction of the XFi box and little freebie cable box.
- My room: Subtraction of freebie box, added the Hotwire box. 
- Living room: Subtraction of the Comcast cable box, added the Hotwire box plus an Eero. They unhooked the RCA wires from the Comcast box that connected the cable to the Sony DVDR player (remember I asked about being able to record shows to DVD and they said yes?)
- My mom's room: Subtraction of the Comcast box, added the Hotwire box. 

Internet running, everything on the network we are used to, even has our password. So all devices that sign on to the network, works on the network. So far, all printers are a go. Even the hockey puck works with the smart plug we have for the hall lamp. 

TVs are set up in each room attached to the Hotwire box. But there's a problem. The living room TV doesn't jive with the Hotwire remote. 

Why? Because it's a 48 inch Sanyo and it's on the "do not buy" list for Hotwire. 
Why? Because Hotwire, by the way, is using TiVo. And TiVo doesn't play well with certain brands of electrical devices, including televisions. We should have been told this from the master board.

Wait. Scroll back a bit. 

Hotwire uses TiVo as their cable box??????????

Isn't TiVo over 20 years old and out of style??

Yes to Hotwire using TiVo and no, apparently it's not out of style. Also, we didn't get an approved anything from anyone about what we need for our house. Not even the sales guy said anything.

So my mom has to use the Sanyo remote to power the TV off and on as well as use the volume. But for the cable itself, she uses the TiVo remote. Not what she wanted to do, since her TV in her bedroom is on one remote and my bedroom is on one remote. 

Which, by the way, Vizio is not an approved TiVo television, according to the techs. Yet, it's working fine... even though I'm not using that box for any sort of watching.




Now the ball is kicked further down the hill, quicker. 

Telephone: Everything is hooked up. You can hear a dial tone. All set. 

My mother asks if it's the same star codes she's used to, to check voicemail. Guy says sure, whatever you want. Doesn't give her any information on how to change the voicemail PIN, the greeting, nothing. 

She tries to log in to the telephone information to change things, and can't. She ends up using the phone base answering machine to create a message. Which defeats the purpose of the Hotwire voicemail system since that's the one activated, not the AT&T phone system we have (it's just the cordless phones, not the actual service). 

Plus, every time someone calls, it rings twice and goes to voice mail. Can it be fixed? Guy struggles. He doesn't know. 

Also, will the caller identification show up on the screen when someone calls? No, Hotwire doesn't have that technology.

So we don't get a "someone [at] hotwire [dot] com" email address as part of the email / internet service and we don't get on screen called ID for phone service because this company isn't up to date yet with all these offerings. 

Which is why they're using a 20 year old cable brand for providing television service. 

Which is also why our living room entertainment center is a little clustery.




So they apparently like dirty lines everywhere and keep things looking like a mess, since that whole shelf feels like technology threw up and there's no one around to clean it. 

Yes, we have a VCR and DVD player still. 

I wanted to be able to hook the DVD player into the cable box so we'd be able to not only watch regular DVDs if we wanted, but if there was a tv series or a movie we wanted to record, we could do that as well. But we can't, since this TiVo box only has 1 HDMI output, and that goes to the TV. There are no other connections to use the DVD player. 

I don't know if this exists, but I was actually looking for some sort of hub where you can plug in RCA cables and HDMI cables and be able to see everything under one input and not have to use a switcher. If that is actually a thing, I'd look in to buying it, just in the chance we want to record something. 

VCR is different because I can hook the RCA cables from the VCR to the second input of the DVD player with no problem. I've done that before. It's just a matter of wanting to record TV stuff. 

Which we haven't done in a few months, but that's beside the point. 

Anyway, with this installation, you're supposed to get a tutorial on everything. People keep saying they've not gotten any help or any lesson. 

My mom didn't either. 

When these techs were finally done, the left everything crazy and my mother super chunking upset. By the time I got home and looked over everything, yeah, it's a mess. 

When I turned on my (HP Pavilion g6) laptop, the cable boxes started going fruity. TV shows kept pausing. 

This angered my mother even more since she already had a long day of dealing with problems, now every time a computer was on, the television shows would go wonky.

So she called Hotwire to complain that the television kept pausing. 

Someone was going to come out the next day to fix it, as well as trouble shoot the phone since it still wasn't working. We were missing calls and we couldn't check messages. 

Wednesday I actually had off, since I had a doctor appointment. I went to my appointment, my mother and I did some errands, and we waited for the new techs to come.

Well, what we thought would be easy fixes, the techs (who have decades of IT experience together), couldn't figure out why all the televisions were going to pause and stop mode. The phone issue was out of his hands, since we should have gotten a temporary passcode from someone else in Hotwire, and since we kept insisting we got nothing from no one, he had to call up the ladder and get us a temporary PIN. 

The whole time the guy was here, he was fighting us tooth and nail. It started with him looking at the Hotwire boxes and how they were hooked up, and he said he would never have installed everything like that, but everyone is different, and it's too late now to fix it all. 

Looking at the living room, same thing. 

He's not sorry, but he does have to say these are third party installation people and they are not Hotwire people. They are contractors that are supposed to just be in and out and not do anything else.

Which means they were kind of right to leave wires the way they did for the living room. When asked about the DVD player, he said that I need to keep the Comcast box and figure out how to use it if I expect to tape shows, or even use the DVD player part. It's not Hotwire's job to touch anyone's devices because they are on the hook in case things break.

Which I understand that part, as we used to say that at my last jobs with the AV things. You bring your own device and it doesn't jive, we can't be responsible if it breaks or anything.

However, this being a television / internet / phone company that comes in to provide a service, you should be able to reconnect things or at the very least inform the client that their devices aren't going to work with what you've got. 

With regards to the TV remote not working, he rolled out a laundry list of approved television sets you can buy at Walmart or Target, and all the ones he's mentioning work with TiVo. Everything else, good luck, Chuck. You're on you're own. 

If anything, buy an approved TV and put it in that hole in the entertainment center. My mother says no, she's not buying a new TV just to use one remote. The entertainment center was built for the wall, and what TV we had purchased when we moved here. She's not running to buy another 48 inch tv. 

The guy said that the other option is to buy a TV mount, get an approved television and mount it in the hole, so you can pull out the television, swivel it, etc. He has had plenty of customers who did that, and have had no problems. She asked him if he's paying for it because she's not. He said no way. She asked if Hotwire will, and he said definitely not. So she said why should she? This TV is fine; it's worked with the Comcast equipment, it works with everything else. It's just not working with TiVo. He said if she wants one remote, this is the other option.

Fahgetit. 

I asked about the Roku and using the Comcast email address. Since you need a valid cable subscription and a valid cable provider's email address to verify the subscription, what do we do about the apps I've downloaded to my device? 

He asked me why I would use my Roku now, since everything we do will be on the TiVo. I don't need to watch FX or Discovery or anything else on my Roku. Just go to the Google Play store and download the app. Log in on TiVo.

Yes, TiVo runs on Android and you do have the option to log in with a Google Account, but you have to rely on the Google Play store for everything.

I told him I've already got these accounts made and downloaded. I don't need to be using multiple devices since their service won't let me connect to the thing I already have. 

He wasn't hearing any of that. Remember, he was fighting us tooth and nail and being a ripe f*cker for every question we had. 

I also said that with all these cable companies doling out refurbished equipment, how do I know if I log into Apple TV+ on the TiVo, something won't happen to that box, especially since everything is wireless and you don't know what a storm would do it it? Hotwire could wipe the system but do I know if it's truly wiped?


Because, side note, when we got the XFi box, it still had someone's devices logged into it. I had logged into the admin panel when I went to split the bands, and saw all these devices that never belonged to anyone in my house. 

So the guy got pissy and said that he doesn't trust these Hotwire boxes himself, as he uses his own streaming device. However, what's to say my Apple TV won't crap out? If it does and I throw it away, someone could pick my trash and find it. They could wipe it and sell it or do what they want with it. My ID is still on it because I'm logged in. So my comment is irrelevant. 

I'm telling you, this dude was a dick. 

Anyway, the cable kept pausing and they didn't know what was happening. Two techs were flabbergasted. One thought there was a Bluetooth problem, where something was hindering the connection from the remote to the TV to the box. The other thought was the Comcast remote (which we needed to use to power + volume the TV) was having a problem with the TiVo remote or box. Some sort of cross stream problems. 

Either way, they tried troubleshooting everything, and it was still pausing and having problems. 

They'd have to call the engineers and come back another day. 

They got what they could working, and just reiterated we are stuck with using two remotes for the television since TiVo doesn't play with Sanyo. They will see what they can do about getting higher ups here to fix the pause problem. 

Even though I kept asking if it was an internal setting within the TiVo box. I got "death upon you" glances from the techs, because they knew what they were talking about and I didn't. Even though they had no idea why the screen paused. They refused to check settings, except one.

The HDMI CEC was disabled on the box. It should be enabled. That's how everything talks to each other and why the remotes work. Yet, the option is disabled on my Vizio and everything works perfectly with the remotes. The option is disabled in my mother's room and it all works. Theory should carry over to the Sanyo.

But it didn't. And I kept asking if it was another setting. They didn't want to check.

So they left. 

Thursday no one comes. My mother calls one of the people on the master board who wanted Hotwire. She complained immensely to him. Told him the list of people who were having problems as well, and he said he has heard nothing from anyone about problems, but he will try to make it right. 

He makes a call and the point of contact we have for our community calls her and says he's sending someone over right now. 

Someone comes, they can't figure it out. There is still problems. 

Everyone who has been in our house has seriously hated what the laundry room looks like and finds it unacceptable, but we can't fix it now. The TV is still weird but no one knows what to do. 

Just deal with it.

So what do I do when I get home?

I do a search on the internet. 

Things get wonky.

The power of things I've found plus the power of these devices being Android based... I found the problem within the settings. 

My web browser was trying to connect to the TVs and the TVs were trying to connect to my browser. Chrome was trying to cast / mirror to each other. 

So what did I do?

Searched the TiVo Android app settings. 

Found where the System app settings were hiding.

Disabled Chromecast or whatever the mirroring thing is called under there.

TV has not paused since. 

Unless we press pause ourselves.

I fixed it my damn self and didn't need some arrogant piece of crap tech person harass me about everything.

If only I can fix the remote now!

I can has a new job? Please?




This post has taken me all day to write because I kept having to walk away. I'm sure I missed things, but if I need to update it, I'll create a new post. 

I'm sure I'll have plenty more cases where I'll say how bad Hotwire sucks, as new things are popping up for other people.



Oh, just like how when Hotwire emails you, if you aren't using Gmail, all correspondence goes to your trash. Yahoo, Hotmail, whatever mail... if it's not Google mail, you're not seeing your bills or other information. Figure that one out!! 


Stay sane...

Cheers;







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