TiVo Answers ... the Phone
The phone is finally fixed! It only took Comcast eight days! Yeah!! I actually liked this last problem, though. This was the behavior; person calls the new number, something picks up before the first ring and immediately hangs up. Who was the mystery hangerupper? TiVo.
You heard right. My TiVo series 1 was actually answering the phone. Freaky! And what drove TiVo to refer all incoming calls to the dial tone? A combination of the ring tone signal sent by Comcast's VoIP and the reversed polarity of the wires in the telephone jack that was connected to TiVo. I can't make this shit up.
Why were the wires reversed in that telephone jack? Because the tech who installed that jack when I first got TiVo back in early 2000 did it that way.
So now the question is ... why did TiVo program the units with the ability to answer calls before the first ring, such that the humans in the house would never know? Urgent software patch? American Idol suddenly changes timeslots?
But before we rejoice too muchly, there might be another problem. When I called John this afternoon, he said my caller ID read "Manchester, NH."
You heard right. My TiVo series 1 was actually answering the phone. Freaky! And what drove TiVo to refer all incoming calls to the dial tone? A combination of the ring tone signal sent by Comcast's VoIP and the reversed polarity of the wires in the telephone jack that was connected to TiVo. I can't make this shit up.
Why were the wires reversed in that telephone jack? Because the tech who installed that jack when I first got TiVo back in early 2000 did it that way.
So now the question is ... why did TiVo program the units with the ability to answer calls before the first ring, such that the humans in the house would never know? Urgent software patch? American Idol suddenly changes timeslots?
But before we rejoice too muchly, there might be another problem. When I called John this afternoon, he said my caller ID read "Manchester, NH."
posted by Christopher A. Dellario at 9:41 PM
1 Comments:
It is probably a glitch in the modem hardware causing it to go off-hook.
As for the caller-ID, that's probably where Comcast interfaces with the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).
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