Humboldt has been troubleshooting the issue of light pixelation for a while now, and had come to the conclusion that the reno channels having a touch of pixelation was on their equipment.

As you know, Tuesday had all of the reno channels drop off into heavy pixelation.  I reached out to Humboldt on Wednesday morning, and they confirmed that they were getting pixelation as well, which shifted the issue to the only shared area between all districts.  They did some troubleshooting wednesday, and ended up driving to Reno to replace a switch that could have been problematic, only to have no change or improvements.  At this point it’s confirmed as the circuit between Switch and PBS.

Friday will have SkyFiber replacing their router at PBS just in case that is the culprit.  If that doesn’t have any change, it’ll be the underlying carrier that SkyFiber uses to go from PBS to Switch.  They will be reaching out to the carrier to see if they can get any troubleshooting done to restore the circuit stability.  If they can’t get it fixed tomorrow, all reno channels will be degraded through the weekend, and potentially until either SkyFiber or their underlying carrier can get the circuit restored.

I’ve been talking with Ken on some options to get signal restored. Unfortunately they are not necessarily cheap and particularly quick.  We may be able to get CBS to give us a SRT stream, which would get channel

2 back.  Fox doesn’t have the ability to stream to us over internet, so we’re basically down with them.  KOLO is unknown.  PBS is unknown.  If we can get a SRT stream from any of the unknowns, we can get their channel back online and bypass the PBS head end.  This would be the quickest and closest to 0 cost option, assuming the studios can stream to us.  If not, they either remain offline or we start adding equipment costs. The next option would be to order a Nimbra (existing streaming device that Eureka and Elko use) to place at PBS.  This could then stream over the existing connection to Switch, which would allow us to have a buffered stream that doesn’t rely on carrier perfection.  The estimated bare minimum cost for that is about $12,500. 

I will update with further.