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Communications

TiVo Says It Will Discontinue Support For Dial-up Service Later This Month (betanews.com) 91

Posted by msmash from the end-of-an-era dept.
BrianFagioli writes: Surprisingly, TiVo still offered dial-up access to some of its users, allowing them to download program guide information. Sadly, this week, the company started alerting those users that it will be discontinuing dial-up connectivity later this month -- the end of an era. TiVo sent the following email message Tuesday evening. "TiVo will be discontinuing our dial-up service on September 30, 2018. According to our records you may still have one or more TiVo devices connecting to the TiVo Service via dial-up. Your TiVo box will still be able to receive program guide data from the TiVo service via dial-up modem until September 30, 2018. Following September 30, 2018, your current subscription plan will remain active even if you are not using the TiVo Service. If you would like to continue using the TiVo Service, we have outlined several options for you below." Comically, the company suggests two alternatives -- use Ethernet or buy a Wi-Fi adapter. Look, while those are technically accurate options, if someone is still using dial-up connectivity with their TiVo in 2018, they probably don't have broadband access.
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TiVo Says It Will Discontinue Support For Dial-up Service Later This Month More

TiVo Says It Will Discontinue Support For Dial-up Service Later This Month

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  • ethernet/wifi with dialup is possible (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Wycliffe ( 116160 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @10:09AM (#57256274) Homepage

    I used to have a router with a dialup "backup" line for if the main line goes down. Windows even supports creating a "hotspot" to share an existing connection which would presumably include sharing a modem. Granted, you would need a dialup account but the one nice thing about dialup is that the ISP could literally be on the other side of the world and it should still work.
    Tivo is probably assuming that even the people using the dialup option, most of them have some sort of internet whether it be satellite, cellular, or something else.

    • This is a good point. There are still dialup internet providers so someone who wants to keep using TIVO without broadband could subscribe to a dialup ISP and then set up a Linux box with the modem and configure a NAT router between the modem/PPP and their ethernet network.

      • I did this years ago when working for an ISP. Put together a BSD box as a gateway, configured it to maintain an always-on PPTP connection to my free-because-I-was-an-employee dialup account, put in a couple of network cards, configured the routing internally, and had 3 computers sharing one dialup connection. Yeah, it was horribly slow, but it was free, and at the time (new baby, crappy tech support job, etc.) that's what we could afford. I don't know that I'd go through the trouble just to download a progr

      • This is a good point. There are still dialup internet providers so someone who wants to keep using TIVO without broadband could subscribe to a dialup ISP and then set up a Linux box with the modem and configure a NAT router between the modem/PPP and their ethernet network.

        I sincerely doubt the average dial-up/TIVO user has the technical wherewithal to implement that solution. It is a nice solution, though (and I'd totally go for it if I were in that kind of a pickle.)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by bobby ( 109046 )

        This is a good point. There are still dialup internet providers so someone who wants to keep using TIVO without broadband could subscribe to a dialup ISP and then set up a Linux box with the modem and configure a NAT router between the modem/PPP and their ethernet network.

        As a Linux admin I love it and had it that way for years, then as a backup for broadband outages (which have been rare). But, most average people run Windows, and Windows will do NAT through "Internet Connection Sharing" which is pretty easy to setup and run and seems to work with dialup modem Ethernet/WiFi.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dryeo ( 100693 )

      A couple of years back, my ISP announced it was dropping dial up due to it being too hard to get equipment. Whether true or not I don't know.
      I continued using dial up (for free instead of the $45 a month they were charging) for another year until they built a cell tower. This is Canada, where internet is considered a vital service, so they couldn't actually just shut it off.
      I did route the dial up from my computer to a router and supply WiFi to the house but it was pretty crappy towards the end. Even Slashd

    • I had a DirecTV/TiVo with dialup, but there was no ethernet or wifi option. It would have required buying a new box altogether (and after a certain point also new satellite dish, new adapters, and so forth). The only thing dialup was used for was reporting back purchases, since the satellite was used to download program info. I think after a while the dialup stopped working reliably, so when I finally send the smartcard back when I cancelled the service I got a bill for 3 or 4 movies that had never been

  • Probably more correct than comical... (Score:3)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Wednesday September 05, 2018 @10:12AM (#57256290)

    ...Comically, the company suggests two alternatives -- use Ethernet or buy a Wi-Fi adapter. Look, while those are technically accurate options, if someone is still using dial-up connectivity with their TiVo in 2018, they probably don't have broadband access. ...

    The summary writer, in an effort to try to make himself look knowledgeable, overlooks an important aspect --- the TiVo customer may still be using dial-up instead of the Internet access available in the house because of one simple reason --- dial-up works and has worked. It just worked, so why fix it by switching it over to the Internet?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by msauve ( 701917 )
      ...or they may be using an older TiVo which didn't have wireless or convenient Ethernet, but did have a nearby phone jack. There are still working TiVo Series 2 boxes and Series 3 didn't come with Wifi. Although either can be added at a price, why, if dial-up was working?

      And, of course, broadband is not a requirement. Windows connection sharing still works, and there are other solutions for sharing a dial-up connection. Or bring up a cellphone hotspot and manually force a TiVo connection, it really only ne

    • And you can't just switch to wireless if your TiVo box only has dialup as an option. Not everybody goes out and buys an expensive replacement when they already have a perfectly good piece of equipment that does the job well.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        And you can't just switch to wireless if your TiVo box only has dialup as an option. Not everybody goes out and buys an expensive replacement when they already have a perfectly good piece of equipment that does the job well.

        The only boxes that have dialup are Series 2 and Series 3 boxes. (Series 1 have been discontinued - TiVo gave everyone with one of those $75). TiVo is making available a $25 wireless adapter that works with both kinds of TiVos (it plugs into the USB port) so all TiVos in the system that

        • I had the DirecTV+TiVo. There was only the POTS connector. The wireless adapter wouldn't have helped at the time 15 years ago when I didn't have internet connectivity in the living room.

    • I assume they hardly have anyone using it - and at least in my experience on the data center side of things it costs a small fortune to support dialup (compared to other connectivity methods).

  • You can't dial into Tivo if you don't have a phone line. AT&T is already discontinuing landlines in almost 1/2 of the US:

    https://www.moneytalksnews.com... [moneytalksnews.com]

  • Or... their TiVo is so old it doesn't have built-in ethernet or wifi. The big "problem" with TiVo in the beginning was that it required a phone line near your TV! I remember hacking my Series 1 TiVo with an PCI ethernet card; not everyone was capable of doing that. I'm not even sure they had USB back then. If people simply replaced an old Series 1 TiVo with one that supported digital TV, they may very well have simply moved over the phone line! My Series 3 HD supported MOCA and ethernet, but required an ext

  • Thanks to the way any house over ten years old is wired, many rooms have telephone lines built in.And many Tivo's didn't ship with built in wi-fi, but sold separate, Tivo-branded dongles(read: markup). Given the small amount of data Tivos require, and the infrequency with which they did, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people weren't still using the telephone option, even when they have broadband.

    • They dropped their tivo quite a few years ago, but when they still had it, it was connected to their phone line because that just worked. The tivo didn't have wifi so they'd have had to spend more money to hook it to the network and there was nothing to be gained from doing that.

  • It's not the most common case, but if you still use antenna / analog cable, you probably can't or won't get broadband in that place. Just like Netflix still has a DVD rental service that serves its customer fine. Tech giants are only interested in growth markets, but there is still a lot of money to be made for long time in non-growth markets. Maybe not for S&P 500 company, but enough to put food on someone's table.

  • This isn't dial-up Internet service. Why is everyone complaining that users should use broadband instead of dial-up?

    Tivo came along before broadband was popular so the method of getting program data was to dial-up directly to Tivo to download that data. This was the only method on the first Tivos (series 1) which stopped being supported in 2016 when they changed the guide data. Your Tivo would dial a Tivo number in the middle of the night and download program data.

    This announcement is mostly applicable t

    • Actually, based on reading various forums, there appear to be quite a few Series 2 units out there still in use. Also, there's still an active market for series 2 units with lifetime subscriptions on e-bay (search for "tivo series 2 lifetime")

      We have a series 2 and still use it regularly. The analog tuner issue isn't a problem since you can get cheap or even free digital to analog converter boxes. The dial-up change won't affect ours since it is using our broadband (via wifi) to get the program updates
    • I still have a series 2 and used it up to a year ago, when I moved. The reason lots of people still use it is because series 2 is the last with an IR blaster.
      I used it because the only TV stations I could get was a satellite and there were no recording receivers for that system. With the IR blaster I could record shows on multiple channels and watch when I wanted.

  • will tivo push for QAM 4k or push for cable card like laws for cable iptv? Or just rollover and make cable iptv be cable co rent only with outlet fees per tv?

  • Remember having an old TiVo with only dialup interface. There were hacks to add Ethernet. There were hacks for a lot of things. This was the nice thing about TiVo.

    Thing about TiVo model is the subscriptions. Many people didn't get lifetime deal and pay a monthly fee so there is always financial incentive to take seriously keeping old systems going as long as possible. They even retroactively added H264 to the now ancient HD series when Comcast switched.

    My opinion of TiVo soured after waking up one day

  • I'm surprised they were still provide dialup service.

    I used to have an original Series 1 TiVO with a lifetime subscription. It didn't offer an Ethernet connection so I used dialup. It worked OK for several years, but then it started to get slow, wasn't reliable, and they started changing the local dialup number every month or so. It became tedious to keep up with. I found some online resources that showed how to configure the TiVO for SLIP using its serial port and connected it to a serial interface o

  • if someone is still using dial-up connectivity with their TiVo in 2018, they probably don't have broadband access

    What do "ethernet" or "wi-fi" have to do with broadband? I wired my house for ethernet when I was still using dial-up.

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