[SOLVED] One cable line, two accounts.

[afrosonic]

My house has a single coax cable line coming from the telephone pole outside. Connected to this line is my housemate's active Comcast cable modem. I would like to order my own Comcast service.

Do I have to have Comcast pull another coax cable to the house? Or can I simply split the existing cable just before its connected to my housemate's cable box?

 

[rgd1101]

contact comcast.
But yes. it could be just a simple as splitting the existing cable.

 

[bill001g]

Technically it is easy just use a splitter but sometime the cable company will not activate 2 services at the same address. Not sure why since they make more money for little effort.

I would call and verify it is allowed before you buy a modem.

 

[afrosonic]

Thanks for the replies. I suspected that was the case, or at least that was the way it worked back in the day.

My housemate's service does 60Mbps download (tested). I plan on getting the same product. Do you think the coax from my house to the pole can support 120Mbps? Also, where does the coax multiplex onto fibre?

 

[bill001g]

If you were to go out in the street and open up the boxes the cable company has most just contain simple splitter connecting multiple house. They connect a large number of houses on 1 single run of coax. Eventually these run to some central box that also has fiber.

The reason this works is there is a lot of bandwidth. Lets say they are using docsis 3.0 and they have just over 1gbit of bandwidth. They could sell 300mbps plans and 4 people could be running at maximum rate. They know that almost nobody runs constantly at 300mbps so they can pretend that say 100 customers can each get 300 because they gamble that they will not all try at the exact same time. They also have ways to limit heavy users if they do hit their maximum.

This shared bandwidth would be the only technical reason I could see a ISP saying no to 2 modems in a house if they already have capacity issues on that section of coax.

It is not just cable that works this way. Many fiber to the home systems also work this way. Most system you do not have a dedicated fiber to your house it is spliced with a bunch of neighbors fibers and you share the bandwidth. It uses something called GPON rather than docsis.

 

[SamirD]

In the mid-2000s, I had 3x cable modems at my house with all 3x running full speed as they were 3x different accounts. It's not only possible, but very easy for them to do. Just call them and tell them what you want. It will be confusing to them because they don't do it often, but you'll eventually reach someone that can do it.

 

[gggplaya]

It really depends on the speed of your housemate. If they had a gigabit plan, then it may not be possible, but since they only have 60mbps then unless you live in an extremely congested area, you should have enough bandwidth available to add a second line.

The problem, as stated earlier is billing. They may not be able to have 2 accounts at the same address.

Also, keep both wifi routers far apart from each other. I had 2 routers on a table once, as I was setting 1 up to install elsewhere. Even though they were on distant channels from each other, there was enough signal strength to cause wifi interference and dropped my connection. Many times, cable companies require an installer to come out, just have thm add a line on the other side of the house.

 

[USAFRet]

The only entity that can say yea or nay is your ISP.

 

[Wolfshadw]

For the record, I asked Comcast about this a number of years ago and they flat out said, "No". They may have since changed their tune, but they were pretty obstinate about it.

-Wolf sends

 

[SamirD]

For the record, I asked Comcast about this a number of years ago and they flat out said, "No". They may have since changed their tune, but they were pretty obstinate about it.

-Wolf sends

I know different regions also have different rules too. Wow wouldn't do a residential and business at the same address, charter spectrum would and I think charter spectrum in another region of the country said they couldn't, so there's no guarantee even with the same company. But generally, this isn't a hard thing to do--the hard part is finding someone that knows how to set it up.