cable and internet
Aug. 10th, 2009 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
comcast is charging us too much for our cable. They also want to force us to use digital boxes, which would make our (almost first generation) replay box unhappy. (I think we have and IR blaster, but I'm not really sure if it all would work.
Does anyone have any recent stories about their cable modem net or know of a really nice deal? I'm almost thinking of canceling the cable outright and getting everything from netflix and on line.
Does anyone have any recent stories about their cable modem net or know of a really nice deal? I'm almost thinking of canceling the cable outright and getting everything from netflix and on line.
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Date: 2009-08-10 09:13 pm (UTC)I told them that on principle I was not willign to buy a TV-net-phone bundle even if it was cheaper than the a la carte price fo just net and phone, but that if they couldn't compete with anyone *else* for net and phone we would go elsewhere.
So ~1 year ago we switched to verizon for voice and DSL. We did have to add a phone jack to our office first. Verizon for those 2 services including caller ID on the phone, which we wanted, is price competitive with what we'd been paying comcast then. We deemed verizon's DSL to be adequate vs what comcast's cable net cost. Performance has been ok since then. Verizon had an initial spate of calls to try to sell us more services once we signed up, and we had to keep telling them to stop calling to offer us new crap. (however, the other idea was that then we'd have less switching to do if Verizon ever ran fios to Somerville... so that particular new crap, yes, PLEASE sell that to us. ;-)
I'm thinking of cancelling netflix too, we don't really use it enough.
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Date: 2009-08-10 09:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-10 09:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-10 10:08 pm (UTC)sadness
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Date: 2009-08-11 04:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-10 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-11 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-11 02:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-11 04:33 pm (UTC)And I don't want a digital box. My TV is the size of a paperback--where am I going to put their monster box? But they want to force one on me so I can get On Demand (which I don't want) and the like.
Dang captchas. I can neither read the written one, nor understand the spoken one.
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Date: 2009-08-11 04:35 pm (UTC)Only took 4 tries for this one.
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Date: 2009-08-13 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-11 04:27 pm (UTC)There are folks in Canada complaining that Shaw Cable is encrypting channels with the '0x02' flag. This flag has the effect of making the IEEE1394 (Firewire) output useless to customers who use third-party PVRs and forcing them to use (read: pay to rent) Shaw's recording system. I think in the U.S. this behaviour is against the law, but don't count on being allowed to use your recorder on their digital box. Chances are they will find a way.
I wonder if you have a clear shot at the southern horizon, and it is time for a dish? I hear the available programming is more varied and the price much lower. I am sure you can tolerate snow outages, if that happens and you might even be able to put it in the crawl space instead of out on the roof.
Also, have you tried your over-the-air signals? Assuming you have an ATSC receiver, you might be pleasantly surprised. Back in the analog days, I got a whole lot of different stations when I was visiting.
The digital rooftop antennas are quite small compared to the old analog ones.