Cannot communicate with Smart Card
 

My STB went wrong last week and was replaced. The new box is now throwing out this error message:

"A002 Your set top box cannot communicate with the smart card."

The side effects seem to be:
1) I can view *lots* of channels even those I don't subscribe to.
2) All encyrpted channels have a habit of crashing the box Ch5, SKY1 etc

I've cleaned the card and replaced it to no avail.

The engineering pages also show that there a a few bad blocks in the flash memory - is this normal, or have I been given a brand new borked box !

Can't phone customer support as all the systems are down - aaarrgggg.

They get one more chance and SKY+ here I come.

Re: Cannot communicate with Smart Card
 

Sky+ is going to be a lot more expensive than your NTL subscription ... if you wanted +, why did you go for NTL in the first place? :angel:

Hopefully one of our resident NTL techs will be along soon enough with some advice, seeing as you can't phone CS at the moment. However my own (entirely non-technical) suspicion is that they have given you a duff box.

Re: Cannot communicate with Smart Card
 

I got NTL originally as I wanter a cable modem and there was no ADSL on my exchange at the time.

To be fair, NTL has been fine for the last 3 years. I'm just irritated having had three engineer visits in the last week (and having to take time off work each time).

Re: Cannot communicate with Smart Card
 

Understandable! I believe you can now take Cable Broadband without the TV service, so don't be afraid to threaten to walk if they don't seem to want to help fix your TV.