Only the apartments that are enrolled in the MDU system will be physically connected to an SWM coax, so the only way an SWM could get overloaded would be for an established SWM subscriber to independently add his own receiver.
I'm not sure about this, but I think that once a residential subscriber's account is registered as part of a MDU system, only the MDU operator can add receivers to that account, so if a resident simply legally procured a receiver elsewhere, he would have to pay "full fare" for that receiver's subscription to activate it, so it would not be worth his while to do so.
I would say the only way that someone might surreptitiously overload an SWM is by taking a receiver that was registered to another person's valid account that additional premium programming included in its subscription.
Even though I do commercial service only and service lots of MDUs, I have so far avoided getting directly involved in any SWM projects because I don't have the time that would be necessary to deal with the "bleeding edge" characteristic of managing this technology when something could just "go wrong" that I cannot efficiently diagnose. Right now, if I were called to troubleshoot an SWM application that involved multiple apartments, and if I couldn't definitively find a fault in the parts of the distribution system I have ready access to, I would hate to have to contact the other subscribers who had not yet complained about their DirecTV service, asking them how many tuners they have (they might lie), or then asking them if they could power down their unit, or let me into their unit to test a device that was not malfunctioning, or suppose the problem is intermittent? Do I tell them their receiver has to be swapped out to remedy an intermittent problem that doesn't affect them and that I can't definitively diagnose?
I once was called out to diagnose a building-wide single satellite stacked LNB system where I determined the cause to be the backfeed from one of the residents. This was not a registered MDU system. It was just a community antenna system paid for by a condo association and installed by a residential installer, and so each subscribing resident sets up his own account and as far as DirecTV's records are concerned, they are a bunch of single family residences.
The most likely cause of the backfeed was that there was an old, low frequency splitter in the apartment that was throwing back the interference. There are other possibilities, but I don't have a relationship with that resident and she wasn't home, so I disconnected her coax, which cut her DirecTV off but restored service to the other unit. Actually, since I had also enhanced the signal strength and quality of the distribution, it would now have worked even with the interference her line was throwing back, but I wanted to eliminate this interference once and for all, so I left her a note telling her what I had found and offering to come into her apartment and remedy the problem, with the HOA paying for the cost of the service and the only cost she MIGHT have to incur would be that of a receiver replacement of that turned out to be the offending component.
She called me that evening and said that she would not "accept" my diagnosis. I politely and as inoffensively as possible told her that she didn't really have a vote in the matter. I was hired by the HOA to remedy a building-wide problem, I remedied it for everyone else but her unit by disconnecting her unit and now she doesn't have any DirecTV (which she did not realize, because she hadn't turned her TVs on yet).
She said she didn't want me in her apartment. I told her that since her DirecTV home run connection was in a secure area controlled by the HOA, she would have no TV service until someone authorized by the HOA reconnected it, and that I was going to advise them against either reconnecting it themselves and to not have it reconnected until someone remedied the interference problem emanating from her apartment, but regardless of how it was resolved, this is the kind of headache that I am not staffed to handle, and the kind that I think SWM operators are going to run into when they receive reports of problems that MIGHT be caused by over-subscription or might be caused by an intermittent hardware problem that is not present when they are on site.
Neither she nor the HOA ever called me to reconnect that unit, so I don't know if someone just physically reconnected her, which as I said, would now work since I did improve the system signal quality enough to make strong enough to withstand the interference, or if she just switched to cable TV
Can anyone with a spectrum analyzer look at the output of an SWM to see if all nine SWM transponders are developed even when the receivers are not calling for all eight available frequencies. If not, then that would give us at least some means to determine how many transponders each apartment is calling for at any given time, but even then, if I come out for a service call based on a complaint by one resident that there was no transponder availability last night, but if two of the receivers in an offending apartment are now tuned to the same program when I arrive, then the tuner over-subscription would not be apparent even if I could detect the number of transponders being called for, which I don't think I can detect anyway.
I'm probably going to be setting up an SWM system in a large building in which I will simply quoting installation terms that carry the cost of furnishing one SWM (or more) per apartment. Since some of the residents in that building are, or have previously been in, the Forbes 500, I don't expect any price resistance, but even at today's SWM prices, it is still a big pill for a small apartment with just one or two tuners to swallow.
I'm not sure about this, but I think that once a residential subscriber's account is registered as part of a MDU system, only the MDU operator can add receivers to that account, so if a resident simply legally procured a receiver elsewhere, he would have to pay "full fare" for that receiver's subscription to activate it, so it would not be worth his while to do so.
I would say the only way that someone might surreptitiously overload an SWM is by taking a receiver that was registered to another person's valid account that additional premium programming included in its subscription.
Even though I do commercial service only and service lots of MDUs, I have so far avoided getting directly involved in any SWM projects because I don't have the time that would be necessary to deal with the "bleeding edge" characteristic of managing this technology when something could just "go wrong" that I cannot efficiently diagnose. Right now, if I were called to troubleshoot an SWM application that involved multiple apartments, and if I couldn't definitively find a fault in the parts of the distribution system I have ready access to, I would hate to have to contact the other subscribers who had not yet complained about their DirecTV service, asking them how many tuners they have (they might lie), or then asking them if they could power down their unit, or let me into their unit to test a device that was not malfunctioning, or suppose the problem is intermittent? Do I tell them their receiver has to be swapped out to remedy an intermittent problem that doesn't affect them and that I can't definitively diagnose?
I once was called out to diagnose a building-wide single satellite stacked LNB system where I determined the cause to be the backfeed from one of the residents. This was not a registered MDU system. It was just a community antenna system paid for by a condo association and installed by a residential installer, and so each subscribing resident sets up his own account and as far as DirecTV's records are concerned, they are a bunch of single family residences.
The most likely cause of the backfeed was that there was an old, low frequency splitter in the apartment that was throwing back the interference. There are other possibilities, but I don't have a relationship with that resident and she wasn't home, so I disconnected her coax, which cut her DirecTV off but restored service to the other unit. Actually, since I had also enhanced the signal strength and quality of the distribution, it would now have worked even with the interference her line was throwing back, but I wanted to eliminate this interference once and for all, so I left her a note telling her what I had found and offering to come into her apartment and remedy the problem, with the HOA paying for the cost of the service and the only cost she MIGHT have to incur would be that of a receiver replacement of that turned out to be the offending component.
She called me that evening and said that she would not "accept" my diagnosis. I politely and as inoffensively as possible told her that she didn't really have a vote in the matter. I was hired by the HOA to remedy a building-wide problem, I remedied it for everyone else but her unit by disconnecting her unit and now she doesn't have any DirecTV (which she did not realize, because she hadn't turned her TVs on yet).
She said she didn't want me in her apartment. I told her that since her DirecTV home run connection was in a secure area controlled by the HOA, she would have no TV service until someone authorized by the HOA reconnected it, and that I was going to advise them against either reconnecting it themselves and to not have it reconnected until someone remedied the interference problem emanating from her apartment, but regardless of how it was resolved, this is the kind of headache that I am not staffed to handle, and the kind that I think SWM operators are going to run into when they receive reports of problems that MIGHT be caused by over-subscription or might be caused by an intermittent hardware problem that is not present when they are on site.
Neither she nor the HOA ever called me to reconnect that unit, so I don't know if someone just physically reconnected her, which as I said, would now work since I did improve the system signal quality enough to make strong enough to withstand the interference, or if she just switched to cable TV
Can anyone with a spectrum analyzer look at the output of an SWM to see if all nine SWM transponders are developed even when the receivers are not calling for all eight available frequencies. If not, then that would give us at least some means to determine how many transponders each apartment is calling for at any given time, but even then, if I come out for a service call based on a complaint by one resident that there was no transponder availability last night, but if two of the receivers in an offending apartment are now tuned to the same program when I arrive, then the tuner over-subscription would not be apparent even if I could detect the number of transponders being called for, which I don't think I can detect anyway.
I'm probably going to be setting up an SWM system in a large building in which I will simply quoting installation terms that carry the cost of furnishing one SWM (or more) per apartment. Since some of the residents in that building are, or have previously been in, the Forbes 500, I don't expect any price resistance, but even at today's SWM prices, it is still a big pill for a small apartment with just one or two tuners to swallow.