When it works its an amazing platform, but when it doesn't you want to go running back to over-the-air TV and scream at the top of your lungs. I wanted to document a few things here to help others.
Your DVR Service is not available at the moment:
The X1 creates a house wide network between the DVR's to allow you to watch a show recorded in one room on any other devices. They also have X1 Mini's, which are tunerless player devices that use the tuners in another X1 box to watch live TV.Under the covers this is using a technology known as MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance). In short this is an Ethernet like network similar to the Power-Line Extenders that you can use to extend a LAN from one part of your house to another. MoCA. This network uses the Coax to create a network in a frequency range above what the cable company can use (1.1ghz) because it does not transmit very far.
But inside your home this is great unless you happen to live in an apartment complex where the guys who installed your cable didn't think "someday it might be important for the connection in the bedroom to talk to the livingroom". In our case all of the Livingroom's (4 Story building) were connected in a daisy-chain and the bedrooms were on a separate chain. The common spot was at the distribution amplifier and the two devices were separated by several splitters/amps that the MoCA network existed but was a very poor connection.
Once we got a technician to re-wire the feed into the apartment so the two connections terminated on the same splitter everything worked great. When I went out to look at what he had done, I also found a filter connected in-line with the input to the splitter. Its a low-pass filter allowing everything below 1ghz through, but blocks the MoCA traffic on our coax from being passed onto the neighbors.
Error Messages RDK-03032 and RDK-03033:
These messages seem to occur mostly during prime-time but in the last few weeks we've been getting them at all hours of the night. Anytime you press any button on the remote, including play/pause the message can appear. The most frustrating is when you are watching a show from your own DVR buffer (not on-demand) and you try pausing playback and you get the pop-up and the show keeps playing.If your a technologist its even worse, your left thinking how can the program be playing but "it can't connect to the X1 platform". After allot of reading it seems many people have reported this in many parts of the country. My best guess is they are trying to store the current playback position of the show to their servers and when it can't instead of ignoring the update lets throw an error. I'm also sure that Neilson or some other data collection firm is sponsoring this functionality to understand consumer behavior.
"Battery Low":
This one stumped me in a serious way for a few weeks. When you press the Xfinity button, next to the time/temp there was a gauge that would show one bar and in the color red. So many posts about changing the batteries in the remote (they are now LoPAN RF4CE wireless, which is how the nice voice feature works).While debugging the 3033 messages I ran across a post that suggested going to Xfinity / Settings (Gear) / Comcast Labs / Cable Signal Strength and check if the signal strength is good. Well look at the other option on that screen that says "Low Signal Indicator: ON" and point to the item and look at that. It says "Display an indicator by time/temp when your cable signal is low".
So a Battery Low isn't a Battery Low at all. Its trying to tell you the cable signal isn't good.
Getting to the diagnostics menu
Press and hold the Exit Button for a few seconds, then press Down twice followed by the Number 2I haven't seen anything that can cause damage, but items of interest are the MoCA stats, which shows a matrix of Device ID's (not useful for knowing which is which) and the Mb/second the connection is managing. Anything below 225mb/sec is troublesome and we are getting around 245mb/sec now and have no problems.
There are other screens that show power levels, but its only for currently watched channels so you don't have an idea how its receiving across the spectrum.
So how did I fix the problems ?
Armed with the knowledge there was actually a signal problem, yet I couldn't see anything in the Diagnostics that looked wrong I started looking more at our Cable Modem/Router status. Under Gateway / Connection / Xfinity network you can see stats for each of the download/upload channels. Power levels were between -0.5 to about +1.1dbm which seemed reasonable to me (techs kept quoting -6 to +6, which has been an answer for many years and felt correct)DOCSIS 3.0 (Cable modem standards) can achieve the stunning speeds we've gotten used to by using several channels in a bonded configuration (think M-PPP if you remember what ISDN is) and we were bonded across 5 channels for download. Upload was just a single channel and it didn't make me think twice about it (upload is a much bigger issue to maintain). But one thing that kept annoying me was that single upload channel was listed a 5m/symbols per second yet wasn't I paying for 10mb upload. Symbol Rate is like Western Digital saying I have a 1TB harddrive with 920MB.
Also the number of correctable and uncorrectable errors was very low compared to received so the error rate was very low. Still nothing other than the "Battery Low :) warning" so whats up.
In Comcast's attempts to make us happy they kept shipping us new modems, dvr's etc. How likely is it that both DVR and cable modem is bad so what else. I know the installers changed splitters, cables and everything but the color of the paint on the walls in my place, but at the bottom of the box of things that had been shipped to me was another 2 way cable splitter. Sure why not give it a try I am seeing a warning about low signal.
Swap the splitter for the new one, reboot everything and login to the router. Well now I have 4 upload channels, power levels are up between 4 and 6db across the board and the DVR seems very happy. I check the X1 diag screens and power levels there are up almost 8db, now between +3db and +9db.
Sadly in all of the work, they wound up using a splitter that was defective and since the tech's still think -6 to +6db is acceptable they were all happy. But the X1 box was trying to tell us something different with its little red power level that would come and go.
How has this improved the connection you ask ?
Just before writing this I decided to goto speedtest.net to see what the changes were. In the past I was seeing 10-30mb down and 1-5mb up. I don't expect anyone to deliver what they advertise and I honestly forget what i'm supposed to be getting (soo many freebies thrown at us during this)You ask what are the new numbers. 91Mb/sec down and 12Mb/sec up.
Ok, that is HIGH SPEED internet !!!!
