My Tablo Journey

General Discussion
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A month or two ago. Really don’t remember because it’s been a long journey…
Happily bought an antenna, cable, booster, tablo. Installed in my garage and wirelessly connected to my mesh system…Buffering, dropped connections, grid not loading (we know this was Tablo issue now after they fixed it in latest firmware update) Frustration!
Tablo logged into my unit and said the signals were full of interference…so I rerouted the coax around some possible interference causing electronics. Got a little better. Got a mesh extender/WAP to hard wire into the mesh…the connections got a little better and at least watchable but still had buffering, and some “lost tablo” on the intranet. moved the extender closer to the mesh net with a longer ethernet cable, factory reset the tablo to remove any wifi connection and set it up as hard wired only (I know tablo says if you ethernet cable the unit it will ignore the wifi but I found that wasn’t the case.
Grounded the antenna, don’t know if this did any good but hey worth a try.
Everything working well and then started to have some more issues, buffering again, blah blah blah same things add infinitum, found out I had a open coax or bad splitter in there so I fixed that and things got a little better…
Then more troubles started again…around and around and around we go. called provider and they said it was my modem but should have an engineer look at it, scheduled for next day, so I disconnected it and got a new one brought it home and installed it and things seemed ok.An hour later I got a text from provider saying they fixed an issue that was causing internet outage or slowdown in the area and if I didn’t need the visit to cancel, so I canceled.

It seems the provider issue was there for a long while but it wasn’t affecting actual usage in the house until we started using tablo which I guess is wifi/ethernet heavy and when they finally fixed the area issue things got a lot more stable. Since then tablo has been pretty solid (watch me go home and eat my words.). Snappy connections to the rokus in the house, recordings happening on time, only a little pixelation during the last rain storm but not bad at all comparatively. I hesitate to say it but I may have got everything hammered out. Did I do an absolute shit ton of work for a supposed plug and play piece of hardware? Yes. This was a journey but it’s been stable for 7 days or so.

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Thanks for the detailed write-up. It does go to show when you decide to move away from cable for example that there are additional variables that have to be considered and things can get deep pretty quickly. Also provides a little balance, not to invalidate the ongoing 4th gen concerns, that the problem isn’t necessarily always the Tablo.

Sounds like in your case things were coincidentally complicated by other factors as well which didn’t make it any less frustrating.

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I def can agree with you. I spent 2 weeks on my Tablo. and multiple days after that before the Roku APP update came out.

I think Tablo does promotes it as plug and play and I think that may skew a LOT of peoples view of the device. I was under the impression that it “should” be easy peezy. I quickly found out that you need some technical fortitude to get it working IF it doesn’t from the jump.

I know some people locally that it was directly plug and play for them. It wasn’t for me. To this day, IDK how they managed to do that.

I personally think Tablo could update their support site with better technical write ups. I wouldn’t say better but MORE of it. I think there should be more resources on it for customers than the forums. For the basic user the forums can spit out a lot of data that they wont know how to digest. Versus a multiple support articles, they can read through.

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