Any cable experts?

[Wade Lippman]

I have cable television/internet/telephone with Time Warner.

The cable comes in the house and goes to a grounded 2 way splitter.
One cable goes to the internet/telephone.
The second goes to an amplifier.
From the amp it goes to a 8 way splitter.

The previous home owner told me that the amplifier was temporary until TW improved the signal, but he never bothered to follow up on it.
I called TW and they told me my signal was as good as it was going to get.

I took the amp out and lost my digital signal. I have 5 televisions and the 4 analog were fine, but I lost the digital.
I disconnected the 3 cables that I wasn't using and put terminators on the open connectors.
The digital improved so i got about half the stations.

So, is there anything I can do, other than putting the amp back?

My first thought was to replace the 8 way with a 2 way and 4 way; putting the 4 way and the digital on the 2 way. I figured that might throw enough signal to the digital to work. But then I recalled they are planning on doing away with analog, so even if it worked it would only be temporary.

Second thought was to remove the first splitter and put the internet/telephone on the 8 way splitter. That should improve the television at the expense of the internet/telephone. It would be a fair amount of work to try that, so I wonder if any knows if it likely to improve my television enough without hurting my internet/television.

Would replacing the 8way with a 6way make enough difference to bother?

Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

[John Lanciani]

I took the amp out and lost my digital signal.

This appears to be your problem, why not just put it back the way it was?

[Brian Elfert]

Is there a reason you don't want to just keep the amplifier? I had Comcast in the house I sold, but I had an 8 way powered splitter with amp built-in. I don't know that I needed the amplification, but I had it. I do know that if I unplugged power to the the splitter that my cable service quit, but I don't know if that was due to the amplifier or something else inside the splitter.

[Rich Enders]

It seems to me that you need to get Time Warner more involved. When we moved in to our home we were getting poor everything based on my plug-in. Cox came out and added an amp inside the house, and then we were fine. We have since gone from analog to digital flat screens, and higher speed internet, and each time Cox redid things externally and internally so that everything works.

[Dan Hintz]

Put the active splitter in as the first item in the line... if you need to split off again, do so after the active splitter.

[Duane Meadows]

8 way split is a huge signal loss to each tap... put the amp back. you have at best 12% signal at each output, assuming 100 % efficiency of the splitter(somewhat unlikely).

Case of if it ain't broke...

[Larry Frank]

I had similar problems when I had cable from Comcast and was always frustrated. I now have DirecTV and it is much better signal. Yes, the signal drops out in real heavy rain but had more outages with Comcast.

[Ole Anderson]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Also check to see if you have an heavy RG11 feed to your house. Unless it is real short, an RG6 feed could be affecting your signal also. Mine improved significantly when they installed an RG11 "pipe" to my house. An older amp might not be up to current specs where digital TV and high speed internet require a higher speed signal processor. And Comcast just replaced my Docsis 2 modem with a higher speed Docsis 3 modem, I now get 12 up/57 down speed. Of course I am paying for it out the yazoo.