Cut the Cord

[george2u2 (imported)]

I got the wife back from the nursing home in October. She demanded cable without even viewing the 57 HD channels that are free.

There are 4 flat screen TV's in the house. Without her at home the first flat screen sat in the box unopened for two years, before it went in her room in a nursing home. My kids retrieved it when she went back to the hospital and started using it in the living room. There is a 32 inch flat screen still in it's box from the black friday sale that everybody is too good to have such a small thing mounted on their wall in their room. Yes, the battle axe demanded a bigger LED bright unit for over her electric bed.

When she goes so does the cable.

Now if I could just get rid of the families smart phones that would be a $5000 per year savings. What really yanks my chain is that none of them answer my phone calls, if I call to ask if they need anything else before I leave the market.

The city just had an public meeting at the high school about "Pornography". They had around a thousand people turn out. It was really aimed at high school students and they plan to have meetings this month at all the high schools. The meeting started out about Chemical Addiction, drinking, smoking..., how the brain works on chemical pathways. When the brain is stimulated by pornography (Masturbation implied not spoken) it releases the same chemicals that chemical stimulants trigger.. causing addiction.

They can squeel like pigs about "porn" and "guns" but they haven't said anything about the violence on all major networks. And it isn't anything new it's been around since television with such shows as "Gunsmoke", "The Rifleman", and "Perry Mason".

OK, enough soap box, I appologize in advance and thank you for letting the old geezer rant.

[Losethem (imported)]

Paolo and his neighbors could have had cable for "only" 3K each. My wife and I live out at the very end of a long telephone line. Dial-up, when the line is wet, was running 17 BYTES (not K) per second. My closest neighbor contacted Comcast about running cable out here. They offered to do so for only $17,000.00 each! We now have satellite (from different providers) for both TV and Internet. (We're on the wrong side of the hill to get any direct reception and satellite Internet is FAR too slow for TV.)

Gee, I need to come for a visit and look at your off the air scenarios. Wrong side of the hill. Hill or mountain? Do you own the top of the hill? Since the change to digital TV, my folks can't get signals off the air where they were able to get them prior to that. Everything went to UHF instead of VHF, and the signals are not as strong. In the valley, I can get everything off the air as I have direct line of sight to the towers, in the hills, no practical line of sight, though 200 feet higher up on the hill next to my folks place you can point an antenna directly at the towers as there are no hills in the way.

--LT

[Riverwind (imported)]

Old Geezer I understand, we have some gamer friends in the UK and mainland Europe who all have much faster internet then any of us, and its cheaper. Oh what some competition would do but it will never happen, its all about big business and the rich. Makes you wonder, if other countries can do it why can't we?

River

[george2u2 (imported)]

We have a broadband wifi router at 54 mps, fast enough to watch hulu, and netflix, and my son inlaw to play his online three dimensional games at the same time without buffering.

Centuray link comes over 60 year old braided phone lines, hasn't worked since 2400 baud modems and prodigy.

[shortone (imported)]

Although we get about three offers from Comcast in the mail each week, no cable TV here. We DO have direct fiber from one of our two "phone companies" to our home, and we DO subscribe to high speed Internet over the fiber (same speed up and down), although not their ultra fast package. Tacked on is Internet phone service with free unlimited LD to anywhere in the US (and maybe Canada - not sure). They nick us about 69 bucks a month for those services but the phone comes loaded with every imaginable service you can conjure up, programmable from our computer.

But I digress, the one TV we have has a set of "rabbit ears" connected to it so that we can receive the local stations. The broadcast towers are only about 15 miles away via the flatlands, so the signal is acceptable. Even so, it's a miracle if that one TV is on for as much as an hour a week. Everything offered is garbage. Don't miss it at all.

-so

[A-1 (imported)]

Paolo and his neighbors could have had cable for "only" 3K each. My wife and I live out at the very end of a long telephone line. Dial-up, when the line is wet, was running 17 BYTES (not K) per second. My closest neighbor contacted Comcast about running cable out here. They offered to do so for only $17,000.00 each! We now have satellite (from different providers) for both TV and Internet. (We're on the wrong side of the hill to get any direct reception and satellite Internet is FAR too slow for TV.)

If you have good cell phone service you should be able to get high speed Internet service. Check into it.

[Dave (imported)]

When my township is pretty damn rural and when it got its contract with COMCAST about 12 years ago, everyone got installed free as part of the introductory deal. So everyone signed up for the first three months cheap and half the people cancelled after that.

THe phone company was independent through Finleyville (don't worry, even the people that live there never heard of the town) and it sucked until last year when they wired fiber optic and offered FIOS. I told them after 30 years of bad service, I wasn't going to upgrade to anything telephone.

Pittsburgh Comcast was screwed up bad before Comcast bought it. Years before, Some shithole company decided to run over 100 channels on two coax cables and give people either "A/B" switches or converter boxes. JHFC (don't ask me to translate that) it was so screwed up that neither the City or Comcast can replace enough wire and boxes to get it working the right way...

Now right next door in Mount LEbanon, they used to get ADELPHIA cable and it had speciality channels like "brain-waves" And "all day yoga" ...

There's a whole bunch of senior citizens I know keep changing from one provider to another (Cable, FIOS, Satellite Dish) and when they run out of free or cheap months on the introductory offer, they scream and yell and get a new service with the introductory offer...

There once was 132 contracts for cable providers because there are 132 municipalities in Allegheny County, including the County government.

Talk about screwed up...

[HeatherJ (imported)]

I dropped cable a year ago just before they began charging monthly rental fees for the now-required cable boxes, which would have roughly doubled the cost for my "broadcast basic" (i.e. pretty much the broadcast channels available in the general area, a few public-access stations, and then a large bunch of home-shoppping/religious/foreign-language channels that I considered a waste of bandwidth) I'd had for the previous 8 years. For the dozen years before that I had a more-expensive tier of service (with maybe a half-dozen more channels that I actually watched) during which the monthly charges went up from $29.95 to over $90. The "broadcast basic" was a sixth of that. And now I get most of that free with indoor antennas. I lost one CBS affiliate, the local PBS station (and sub-channels) with the best programming, and a local university channel. The public-access channels are available on their websites. I've gained whichever sub-channels (Bounce/Antennatv/THIS/Cozi) the cable system doesn't carry. My last rescan showed 50-odd stations available over the air, most of which are hsn/religious/foreign-language/24-hour infomercial/audio-only/bogus, but that leaves me the seven local broadcast stations of my youth, plus two new ones, plus another nine sub-channels with viewable content. Plus whatever's available on Amazon Prime. More than enough content.

I also cut the landline cord three months back, and replaced it with a voip box and a free Google Voice number; the savings so far have more than paid for the hardware. The cable savings have probably paid for THAT hardware by now (I've had three set-top boxes burn out, and bought a number of indoor antennas that weren't suitable and/or failed) but not by much. Still, it's all free now except upkeep, electricity, and replacing bunt-out items.

[Riverwind (imported)]

I have the new fiber optics that they installed last year in the park were I live but I am thinking of giving it all back and get dish for everything. As I look more into this it might be the best deal yet.

More Later,

River

[devi (imported)]

For the last year I've had free basic cable and my wireless internet options have somewhat deteriorated. I'm hoping they don't disconnect the cable until after the show that I've watching is over in April but it has already ended in Mexico so I can easily read the rest or download the last episodes over the internet. Then there is PBS and some other interesting programming in places but all in all it's really not worth it if I were to pay for it. Sometimes I start watching a sitcom but never see the full show since at the ads I just shut it off and go away. There's also Fox which I turn to and roll my eyes at every so often. Interesting. I've seen a few good things on CSPAN too. Otherwise I wouldn't want it. It's NOT worth it.