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I worked for Telewest for 5 years in a variety of technical roles, yes their IT systems will be able to identify that your box is not posting back.
But! to my knowledge (I left a while ago) they do not actively monitor this as a possible fraud issue, mainly as it would be very expensive to monitor this and NTL/Telewest are still hugely in debt.
But if they did start doing that, they would have the following problems.
1. They have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the reason they have no return path is due to ilegal use (as i have read the Dbox doesnt have a return signature at all so cant be detected) in order to obtain a search warrant.
2. The Cable companies have never bothered attempting to gain warrants to individuals premises unless they beleive someone is selling on the goods to defraud them (ie sell chipped boxes/kit rigged to de-fraud the company). They dont tend to target the end user as its not cost effective and they are pretty skint at the mo.
3. The evidence that no information is being sent back is useless on its own, all this tells Telewest is that the modem in the box cannot respond to their servers - something that can also happen if the box is faulty (how many people have had a faulty digi box or instalation?) and you would be really suprised on how many boxes out there will work fine for streaming the TV channels but cant handle the data services (even EPG) and the owners are none the wiser.
Think your Nan getting Digital for the first time after using her black and white portable with half a coat hanger for the past 50 years - she thinks wow the pictures nice! and happily watches without using interactive services. This isnt including the Areas of the UK that have no upstream available (although they may have been cleared now there were areas that had no modem capabilities - they usde to be called 'Cable-time' basically a highbred of cable tv and a comunal ariel)
But if you are concerned then you can fit a splitter and wire up your old box at the same time, be warned though this will increase interferance and could cause signal problems to your digibox and dbox.(Telewest recommend that you run no more than 3 digital applicances in one household)
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