To Cable TV or Not to Cable TV

Last week I called Comcast and requested that they downgrade my cable television service from the Digital Classic package to broadcast channels only. This is a rather fun conversation to have with the Comcast folks. Their procedure seems to require that they escalate the call at least twice to give a couple of supervisors a chance to talk the caller out of this decision. Despite their efforts, I prevailed and the service has been downgraded. This downgrade will save us about $50/mo.

Gone are the satellite channels and the on-demand service. What remains are just the channels that I would be able to receive with an antenna, if I had a desire to put one on my house. The trick now will be to adjust my viewing habits to the remaining service.

My first trial was making it through the first round of the baseball playoffs. This year the games were broadcast on TBS only, which is not part of the service package that I currently have access to. I had to rely on the radio and the pitch by pitch updates on my phone to follow the progress of the Red Sox. For the next round of the playoffs, I will likely be seeking out a neighborhood bar.

For my other TV viewing needs, I have been looking towards Hulu.com. Hulu has a large quantity of television series available on-demand. Thus far I have worked my way through the first few episodes of 'Fringe' and have caught up on a couple of episodes of 'Bones' that I missed.

The interesting thing here is that you cannot just flip through channels. After choosing a program, you have to wait a minute for it to start and then enjoy the program. Hulu does have ads, but I cannot say that I mind watching four 30-second spots over the course of a 45 minute show when I would have to endure 15 minutes of ads if I was watching it on TV.

My ultimate goal here is to actually start reading a bit more and maybe visit the town library from time to time, but I have to say that it is nice to be able to look to the internet to help wean me from my tv habit.

Taking a Look at the Cable Bill

Our Comcast cable bill came today. For a change I sat down and read it, instead of just paying it. It turns out that along with their 6Mbps internet access and "Digital Starter" cable tv service, we are paying $10.95/mo for their "Digital Classic" package.

I noticed that in with the bill there was a nice little chart showing the channels that fall into each package. On this I saw that the Digital Classic package consists of about fifty channels in the 200's. As I looked down the list, I realized that we never really watch any of these channels. From time to time I look at them when there is nothing on, but no where near enough to justify $10.95/month, so I decided to call Comcast.

During the call the Comcast rep came close to talking me into changing to their "Triple Play" package (Internet/Cable TV/Phone), but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. It would have involved locking in to their service for either 12 or 24 months and paying a $99 installation fee.

This "installation" would involve having a rep come out to our house upgrade us to a combo internet & phone modem. I am familiar with how this is setup. A couple of weeks ago I help a friend move his Comcast combo modem down to his basement (so he did not have to look at it anymore), but Comcast was not willing to allow me to "install" it myself.

End result here was that I decided to stick with what we have, just without the Digital Classic package. And I did have the added joy of being charged $1.99 for the right to remove the package from our service.

I have to say I am still holding out hope for FiOS, but it looks like it will take a while to arrive. I recently ran into an article that tels me that the town of Hanson, MA is not on the FiOS expansion list for 2008.

Maybe Verizon will change their mind.

Connecting to the Internet

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I have seen quite a number of articles that discuss Comcast and Net Neutrality (or their lack of). As I have said in the past, I currently have a Comcast cable modem running at 6.0 Mbps. I also have Comcast Cable TV service that costs about $65/mo. The issue that I am starting to have with Comcast is that believe that they have a vested interest in keeping my connection speed configured in a way that prevents me from fully enjoying streaming video online and ultimately canceling my Cable TV subscription.

For example, if I try to watch streaming content on Joost or Netflix WatchInstantly, both services hang or get a little choppy after a few minutes. I used to think that they problem was with the streaming content provider, but more recently I have started to wonder if the issue is with the way Comcast brings the content to me.

Ideally, I could go with another company for my internet service. The problem is that my only choices are: Comcast Cable or DSL (Verizon, Earthlink, etc).

I do not want a land line phone, so DSL is going to be a problem. Even if I did want one, as I wrote yesterday, Earthlink DSL does not really make any sense for me. I think that Earthlink is just a value added reseller of the 768 Kbps DSL service that Verizon will happily sell to me for half the price. The "value added" in this case being some type of magical compression technology that allows the Earthlink marketing folks to sell the DSL as being a 1.5/3.0/6.0Mbps service.

The problem that I have with compression is that I remember a time about ten years ago when the modem hardware hit the logical limit of 56k and there were no more dial-up modem upgrades coming out (with the exception of just making the modems smaller). Many of the dial-up ISP's offered "compression" technology with theoretical speeds of 2 or 3 times faster than 56k. I simply did not find this to be the case and this did not leave me with much faith in compression as a true speed boost.

I need more options.