Context: my apartment building used to provide basic cable to all the residents, and we had cable boxes in our apartments as well as in the lounge spaces in the main office building. They discontinued the service for residents and we had to turn in our boxes, but the tvs in the lounge space still have cable boxes and get those channels.
If I bring a cable box from a friend’s place and plug it into my wall in my apartment, will I have cable again?
I guess what I’m asking is, does the service really come from the box or from the cables in the wall?
In: Technology
Today, in modern cable systems they send a signal to the cable box to disable the box, but the cable coming out of the wall has full signal.
Before digital cable they would have to come and physically disconnect the cable coming into your house from the pole as analog cable could just be hooked up to a TV without a box
But today, with digital cable the signal is encrypted and the cable box is required to decrypt the signal. By simply disabling the cable box, they can ensure you can’t watch without paying since you can’t just hook the cable directly into your TV, and they save the cost of sending a guy out to disconnect the cable
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