I don't buy this. We had an old cable box that had instantaneous channel-switching. The cable company made us switch to a brand new one. Same signal coming in, but the new one was infinitely slower. It wasn't some change in the signal that made things slow, it was the software and the complete lack of care for performance.
You get the cable box for the new system BEFORE they switch the old system off, or else you wouldn't have service until you got a new box. That's why you saw behavior change with the new box.
It simply isn't possible to send all the channels to customers at all times. There isn't enough bandwidth. So, the cable box at your house negotiates with the central or regional system so only a subset of channels are sent to you. There is no other way to do it in digital cable systems, and the switch to digital was made because it uses significantly less bandwidth than analog.
The old cable boxes were literally switches, with all channels flowing into the box all the time. Now switching is virtual and done on the server (plus all the software encoding/decoding).
Right now I would be satifsied with at least some caching of the menus, so it doesn't have to pull the data everydamntime I scroll up or down. Come on, it should be able to remember what channels I have for more than 5 minutes in a row.
It probably does cache the data, and it just takes ages to draw. Manufacturers really cheap out on settop box CPU and RAM specifications in order to make the pricing attractive to cable companies.
Yes and they still have insurance to cover the loss, anyway.
You didn't think a cable company was going to deal with it's customers fairly, did you?
Every time you interact with a customer, there is an opportunity for profit. Telecommunications companies, cable TV included, are masters at this type of behavior.
