A cable company has billed me too much after I discontinued with them?

How does the cable company filter basic cable channels?

• I subscribe to local cable television service without a cable box or receiver. The basic cable channels that I do not subscribe to are scrambled. The scrambled channels are in a single range and the neighboring channels are of lesser quality. Is there something installed on the line that scrambles the particular range of channels? At my previous address, I subscribed to the same local cable service but instead received the full spectrum of basic cable channels. The cable company knew this was happening, and had visited our house several times to fix the problem. They told us that they could not filter out the channels because of the distance from the street to the house. Does the effectiveness of a filter lessen with distance? A friend of mine is also receiving the full basic cable lineup while only subscribing to local channels. He does not know why he receives the extra channels. Are there workarounds to receive the full spectrum of basic channels, or can some cable hookups not be affected by the installation of a line filter, such as when a really long coaxial line is used?

• Answer:

  The cable line does have filters installed on them. The filters could be at the street side of your connection or outside of your home. Or they could filter the signal right from the cable box on your TV. All the filter is really doing is filtering a certain frequency from what is being allowed through.