TV Image Freezes and Cannot Watch Prior Station Even After Reboot

I updated my cable box recently before the holidays, a hulking DVR which was almost 8 years old, and have had trouble with my service freezing in all locations of the house (bedrooms, living room, etc.) for about the last month.  My wifi has also been going out intermittently, usually at night.  Calling the on-call service technicians did not resolve the issue, and they did nothing but belittle me.  I finally had a Cox cable service engineer come to my house and test the signal from the street and then coming into the house.  It appears that the newer digital cable boxes are more sensitive to transmission connections than the prior digital cable equipment I had.  I was getting a fair amount of "ingression" (poor transmission and relay) coming from inadequate connections and incompatible equipment, especially the 10-year old splitters I was using. 

The service engineer changed out my older splitters, firmed up the connectors throughout, and tightened everything up, making sure that my signal was adequate for the newer equipment.  Everything seems to be working fine now, but I was somewhat taken aback by how the newer equipment would not function properly with the cabling I had been using for over 10 years, never having experienced a similar problem before.  Cox should inform customers up front that the newer digital equipment may not be suitable for older house wiring (my house is only 12 years old) and should give you a way to validate your installation before handing you equipment that won't work as it did before.  This has been a totally frustrating experience for me as a customer and hopefully this will provide others with a possible explanation for similar cable symptoms since I couldn't find anything when I researched this issue.