Posted on behalf of a friend ( if you want to contact them): I was directed to this thread via IRC. For full disclosure, I'm a current comcast employee, though not one who is afraid to acknowledge the faults of her employer. There are are a couple points here that I'd like to make. First of all, the actions of the technician as presented were inappropriate and far out of scale to the "problem" that he was presented with. "Threatening" your wife is not acceptiable, and should be followed up on. Period. They cannot forbid you from running wires from one property to another. It does not matter what kind of wire it is. That being said, you also have to follow safty codes (which a wire running across the grass is a pretty bad violation of iirc). They CAN bring suit against you for theft of service if they so choose, and try to prove that you were sharing service across properties. Please note, this DOES include wireless. The reason they can is because you signed an agreement with them when you started service. Part of that agreement is not sharing service across properties. Does that give the tech the legal right to chop up a wire he *knew* was in active participation in theft of service? I don't know. IANAL. Was it the correct action to take? Hell no. It escalated the problem way beyond what needed to happen, and has caused any number of other problems. I do want you to understand the frustration that probably resulted in this action being taken. Before I moved to dispatch/field tech support, I stumbled across many, Many instances where people were hooked up illegaly. Most of the time it was simply them using the existing connection after bashing their way into the lockbox. Then others were where they either cut their own fittings (incorrectly most of the time), or just stripped back the dielectric and stuck the center conductor into the port. Most of these illegal hookups also use substandard splitters and internal wiring, and cause immense ammounts of ingress, damaging forwards and absolutly trashing reverse. This kind of noise can totally ruin cable performance for an entire node, not to mention threatening FCC CLI compliance. Large sections of line tech's days are devoted to finding these leaks and handling them, which can be an extremly time consuming and frustrating process. Theft of service becomes intrinsicly linked with frustration and a PITA in their minds. None of this excuses the actions of the tech. I'm sorry you have had this ordeal. You may want to be careful about persuit legaly, as it does require that you admit under oath to engaging in theft of service. **shrugs** Hope you have fun, and btw, you can do much more interesting things with wifi and cable modems then simply use it as a link. I have a friend who is snarfing a neighbors and binding theirs and his for a much bigger pipe :D -- Phil. | Kitsune: Acorn RiscPC SA202 64M+6G ViewFinder philpem@dsl.pipex.com | Cheetah: Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxeV2 512M+100G http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | Tiger: Toshiba SatPro4600 Celeron700 256M+40G -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist