How Time Warner Cable Keeps Service Smooth During Fleet Week

I can guarantee you that absolutely nobody in New York City turned on their TV and said the following sentence:

“Huh. It’s Fleet Week, and my Time Warner Cable signal is just as clean, clear, and crisp as it ever is.”

It’s not the sort of thing that you’d notice, because you expect the cable signal to stay stable and awesome. That’s what you pay for. But until about five years ago, it was really, really tough for us to do that during Fleet Week.

That’s because all those Navy ships and corresponding aircraft pump out a lot of radio interference that used to play all hell with our signals at the 23rd street head end in Manhattan. Our dishes would pick that stuff up and it would cause freezing, tiling, sound dropouts, all kinds of stuff all week long.

The call centers would light up with complaints, but there wasn’t much we could do. A couple years ago we asked the FCC if we could get a heads-up about the kind of frequencies the military would use during Fleet Week so we could adjust accordingly.

We got a big fat NOPE in response. It’s a matter of national security, they said. Fair enough.

We tried bringing in signals from satellite dish farms in Red Hook and up in Inwood, which somewhat mitigated the disruption from the ships themselves. Except military planes would fly past pretty frequently and their radio signals would do the same thing.

Now, with TV delivered via IP, we’ve discovered a solution that’s 100 percent effective.

Larry Pestana, our VP of Field Engineering Operations here in NYC explained the solution to me last week, and we pulled to gather a little video that should explain it nicely. Check it out here:

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