"Tim Perry" wrote in message ...
"Mike" wrote in message
om...
Over this past weekend (when I was away) the electric company came out
here and replaced our digital electric meter with one with the dials
on it.

why? around here they are going the other way with radio remote reading
(drive by) meters.

When I came back early Monday morning I noticed that the analog
cable tv was very poor, most of the channels were grainy or distorted.

all TVs or just one? will the TV work from an antenna?

All of the TVs are like this. The TVs really don't work from the
antenna anyways but I can try hooking it up to see what it looks like
if that's important.



I also noticed that my speed on dialup was rather slow at around 28k
and it's almost always around 40k. I have two ISPs and it was like
this on both of them and on different computers in two different
rooms.

probably an unrelated issue. if it dosent clear up in a few days call the
phone co. if they say it fine call the ISP. do you hear any noise when
making a phone call?


Oh, we've had had noise on all the phones for several years. I usually
get a good speed so I've never bothered with complaining about
something that works good. Although, to get 40k we have to unplug the
downstairs phone from the phone jack, otherwise we get 14k or less. It
could be the ISP but I doubt it. I'll try to dial up a free ISP and
see what happens. I also tried running a test that indicated there was
a lot of line noise so that seems like the phone co. to me.



Both the cable and telephone line was working fine prior to the
meter being replaced and now they're both pretty crappy. This leads me
to believe that the electric company did something wrong when they
replaced the meter. Could this be possible? If so, what could they
have done?

The electric meter along with the cable and phone boxes are all pretty
much beside each other or at least pretty close to each other on the
outside of the house. I looked to see if anything appeared to be
damaged but everything looked alright. Any ideas on what the problem
could be? As far as I know, nothing else has happened around here to
cause these problems. The cable looks like there's some sort of
interference or like maybe the line was cut or damaged somewhere.

TV cables get bad connections and bad amplifiers. if its bad on more then
one TV its probably them. call them and have them check it.

We just had two cable guys come out and they say the cable signal
level is normal. They went ahead and installed an amplifier which
didn't help and made some channels worse, in my opinion. The one guy
said the problem may be outside somewhere but we just had the outside
lines checked and replaced nearly two months ago. Of course, we have
had ongoing problems with this cable since it was installed some 12
years ago. And no, cancelling our service won't help as we get it free
(yes it's legal, we have a contract with them).



Of
course I'm no expert and this is based on what I've seen in the past.
It just seems odd that both the cable and the phone line aren't
working properly since the electric meter was replaced.

usually replacing the W-H meter is a simple unplug it plug the new one in.