Battling Bright House
So I thought that our problems with Bright House had been solved.
To bring you up to speed, @mmagnolia22 and I recently moved up the street and had to have our Bright House service moved with us. They sent an installer to our new address 7 days after we moved. Completely acceptable, if I didn’t work in television and didn’t need the Internet to do my job.
The installer showed up, with an HD cable box in hand. He hooked everything up; I thought we had success. No picture. No signal. Nothing.
After another hour of him looking at splitters in the wall and talking to Bright House dispatchers, he told us he would have to have another installer come out when we could get access to the basement apartment. Great, now we have to disturb one of our new neighbors we don’t even know.
I schedule another appointment with Bright House.
It’s going to take 9 more days to get someone out to our apartment.
I complain.
My complaints on Twitter don’t go unheard, as I receive an e-mail from someone at Bright House. They offer to move up our install time. At this point I had already made it through the weekend without television. So, what were 5 more days when I would be at work?
Bright House sends out another installer. He finds that the line from the curb runs under all four units and in to the basement unit beneath us. The splitter is located in that apartment, and it wasn’t even hooked up. He puts the lines together. Tada!.
But wait. What about the Internet?
The tech didn’t realize we needed Internet as well, even though I showed him where the cable modem was when he arrived. So, he tried to the modem working. Nothing. He can’t get it to “lock down” with the rest of the system. Bright House dispatch sends him out to the curb and has him run a cable from the corner the whole way around the building up to our unit. Look at that, Internet works. Apparently, the signal isn’t strong enough for TWO TELEVISIONS AND A CABLE MODEM. He hooks up two two-way splitters to the cable running in to our unit. The first splitter goes to the cable modem and the second splitter, the second splitter then runs to both televisions.
Great, everything finally works. I can watch television and surf the Internet, no problem.
A week later, @mmagnolia22 says, “Have you been able to get our On-Demand channels to work? I keep getting ‘Error: 106.’”
Damn.
She calls Bright House, they have no idea what an “Error: 106″ is, but they’ll send a technician out. She also lets them know that they’ve had our address wrong since we moved here. They have it listed as Apt. C instead of Apt. B. Bright House says to change that address, they’ll have to cancel and disconnect our service and send another technician out to reconnect the service. I guess we’ll stay as Apt. C.
@mmagnolia22 takes care of everything this time, because it was a day I had to go to work early.
When I get home, she tells me that the installer they sent out that day said, “I don’t even see how you can get signal. You’re going to have to rerun every cable in the unit. I’ll schedule another installer to come out.”
What… the… hell?!

The technician sounded just like Keith David.
So, another installer came out this past Tuesday. The same installer from the second Bright House visit (we’re up to four now). He says the other technician was feeding us a line of bull, and there is no reason to rerun all of the cables.
Bright House still has no idea what “Error: 106″ means and this installer has no clue either, because he doesn’t have a cable box at home. [On a side note, I don't have an edit bay at home, but I know how it works because I use it every day at WORK.]
So, Bright House has him run another line from the curb to our unit, and amazingly the On-Demand channels work.
He runs a line from the basement unit, up to our unit, and On-Demand still works!
In our neighbor’s apartment, he then proceeds to disconnect the other three lines coming off the splitter, leaving ours the only one in tact.
On-Demand still works! Internet works! Regular cable channels work! It’s amazing.
Until Friday.
@mmagnolia22 watched television at 6:00am, everything worked fine.
I got up and went to watch television at 11:00am, and nothing worked. No television. No Internet. Nothing.
I called Bright House this morning. “We can have a technician out to you Wednesday afternoon.” What?! I inform the voice on the other end that we both work, and need a morning appointment (because without a job, we can’t pay for their awful service). “Well, then the earliest would be Thursday morning.” Fine. Whatever.
No idea where the problem came from. No idea about what the problem even is.
All I know, is that this will be five visits from a technician in two months, and I don’t think I want that many problems in the future.
Oh, satellite? What can you offer me?








Wow — sounds like your customer service issues with Bright House are even worse than Comcast here.
My latest conquest was getting my TV fixed. The tech service on the phone said to try a different outlet, if possible. That’s it. That’s all the “technical support” they could provide.
Nine days later, they dispatch a technician. He plugs it into the wall, sees it does not work, and says to bring it back to the store and get a new one. (This was my original request, but they said a technician had to authorize the exchange.)
Awesome.
That error 106 on the Brighthouse channels on demand is due to their bogus software upgrade a couple of months ago. I’ve learned to unplug the box for several seconds then plug it back in and wait 15 minutes for the new software to initialize whenever I get error 106. The channels on demand will then work until you turn the box off, the error message will be back the next time the box is turned on. I put up with this for a month until the box just refused to come back on. They brought me a different box that the cable guy said was much better, it has a half a dozen new error messages and still crashes when I use the program guide. My sister has Direct TV so I think I’ll have to go visit her and run her satellite system through its paces and see what happens. All satellite packages require long term commitments which is the only thing keeping me from switch right away.
@Dave Thanks for the tip! I had tried that with our old cable box, but no luck with On-Demand and eventually they took the box back anyway.
That’s good to know for the future, though.
I’m still waiting for U-verse. Especially since the cable is out again (see No. Not again. Damn Bright House.).
Research “FTA” on google, you will not be dissapionted if you go this route and no long term anything.
@Scotty Thanks for the tip. I\’ll have to look into that.