Blog

The Deci­sion

For the bet­ter part of a year, I have been eye­balling our cable bill. Well, maybe it’s best to clar­ify, because “cable bill” is a lit­tle deceiv­ing. Prob­a­bly like many of you, I have signed up for a bun­dle of ser­vices from a local cable provider – RCN. The bun­dled pack­age includes cable, Inter­net and phone ser­vice. Ok, back to the bill. So, as a I said, for nearly a year I had grown increas­ingly ambiva­lent about pay­ing for the ser­vice. On one hand, I am an unapolo­getic TV viewer and Inter­net user. On the other hand, I am prone to rather strong pangs of fru­gal­ity. (That’s a pretty way of say­ing that I can be cheap.) In my mind, there was just some­thing entirely wrong with pay­ing $200 for this bun­dled ser­vice. Some­thing had to give.

I first started talk­ing to my wife about get­ting rid of the land line. Why do we need a land line? Who calls us on the home phone any­more? I’ll tell you — unso­licited callers and a few peo­ple (fam­ily and close friends) who can’t reach us on our cell­phones. My wife was par­tic­u­larly keen on retain­ing the home phone num­ber, because she’s had it for a long time. “What about peo­ple who I haven’t talked to in a long time? The land line is the only num­ber they would have.” My wife asks/state. Really? (said as dryly as pos­si­ble) is my response. There may be a rea­son you haven’t talked to some­one peo­ple in a long time, was my thought. Add to that, my wife is not hard to find. So, in my  mind this com­po­nent of the bun­dled ser­vice was easy to cut. How­ever, yield­ing to my desire for a har­mo­nious house­hold, I ported (trans­ferred) the home phone num­ber to an unused third line on my cell­phone con­tract. I’m pay­ing for the line any­way, I might as well use it to save the num­ber. Now, as soon as the con­tract term on that third line ends, I am going to port the home phone num­ber to a Google Voice account. That way, we’ll retain the home phone num­ber, and we can access the voice­mail from any­where. We can even have the home phone ring through the Google Voice app our cell­phones if we so chose…or not!

With the land line effec­tively pulled out of the bun­dle, I now had to focus on the real dri­ver of the high bills — that cable. Sur­pris­ingly, coax­ing my fam­ily to go along with get­ting rid of cable was not as tough as I expected. I first broached the idea ear­lier in the sum­mer, and the response was some­what tepid. I think my wife and son are used to me plot­ting on ways to save money, so, per­haps, they didn’t take me all that seri­ously. When my wife landed the job on ABC, I saw an oppor­tu­nity. I knew that she would be in New York four to five days a week. My son is with us every other week, so there’s a lot of time that no one is in the house except me. I brought up the idea of cut­ting the cable again in Sep­tem­ber. Bar­ley a shoul­der shrug from both. I expected more of a strug­gle from my son about ESPN, and my wife about cer­tain cable chan­nels (AMC and Show­time in par­tic­u­lar). Again, I don’t think they thought I was serious.

I called RCN, after the land line was ported, to dis­cuss elim­i­nat­ing cable from the remain­der of my bun­dle. Nat­u­rally, the cus­tomer ser­vice rep­re­sen­ta­tive asked me a num­ber of ques­tions, put me on hold, and them came back with an offer. $139 for the cable/phone/Internet bun­dle, includ­ing all the cable box rentals (5) and the router rental. My eye­brows didn’t even flinch; pri­mar­ily because I knew that when the exor­bi­tant taxes on cable and the phone line were added, my bill would be right back nearly $200. After politely reject­ing the offer more than a cou­ple of times, and con­vinc­ing the CSR that I, indeed, did want cable, we moved to increas­ing my Inter­net plan from 15Mbps to 25Mbps. Though speed on the Inter­net is often sub­ject to the out­put by the con­tent provider, not nec­es­sar­ily your band­width capa­bil­ity, I wanted the increase in speed because we would have mul­ti­ple devices and com­put­ers pulling data. Whew…done!  (Well, the switch to a faster down­load speed plan wasn’t quite the easy, but I’ll explain that in a bit under equip­ment.) I must say that I expe­ri­enced a tan­gi­ble sense of free­dom when I dropped off all of the cable boxes and the modem/router at the RCN office. I walked away with a tiny box con­tain­ing the cable modem.

Equip­ment

Video

Even before con­tem­plat­ing cut­ting the cord, I had been inter­ested in media stream­ing devices. We are big fans of Net­flix in our house, and Hulu­Plus has also become pop­u­lar. Even though I have been slowly creep­ing over to more and more Apple prod­ucts, I was barely even n the fence about AppleTV because it does not, at this time, sup­port Hulu­Plus or Ama­zon Prime video con­tent. Some of the audio func­tion­al­ity of Air­Play are inter­est­ing; but even with two Apple com­put­ers, and two iPads in the house, I wasn’t really that drawn to Air­Play for video. (Don’t kill me Dotch.) That led me to check out a num­ber of media stream­ing devices on the mar­ket — Roku, Boxee Box, WD Live, Sony Net­work Media Player,  just to name a few. I recently pur­chased a Blu­Ray player for my wife’s apart­ment in New York. It fea­tures just about every media stream­ing app you can imag­ine. If you’re in need of a DVD/BluRay player I would sug­gest get­ting one that includes the stream­ing ser­vice apps built in. Why not? I didn’t, how­ever, want or need another DVD player in the house, so I kept my focus on media stream­ing boxes. In the end, I decided on the Roku box because of the extremely large vari­ety of con­tent avail­able and features-for-the-price. We have  one 720p res­o­lu­tion tele­vi­sion and a two 1080p res­o­lu­tion tele­vi­sions in our house. To get started, I picked up the Roku 2 HD (720p – $50) and Roku 2 XD (1080 – $80). I’ll worry about the other tele­vi­sion later because it’s not used that often.

Most of the stream­ing boxes are rel­a­tively small, but I am really amazed by the small foot­print of the Roku boxes.

Set up is very easy. The video qual­ity of the streamed con­tent through the Roku boxes has been fan­tas­tic. Nav­i­ga­tion through the var­i­ous chan­nels is easy, and the inter­face is sim­ple, but usable.

Oh…one word of advice about stream­ing. Some media con­tent (CBS, AMC, TNT) is not avail­able through Hulu­Plus. You have to stream that con­tent directly from the network’s web­site. Not to worry, though. A quick and easy fix to that issue is to buy a VGA to HDMI, or Dis­play­Port to HDMI (Apple), cable. Con­nect the video out on your lap­top and run the cable to the HDMI input on your TV. Voila! Now, I’ve only done this with a Mac­Book Pro, so I’m not sure if you need an addi­tional cable for the sound with Windows-based com­put­ers that don’t have HDMI out­puts. Solu­tions are pretty easy to find, though, if you do an online search.

Stream­ing Services

Speak­ing of stream­ing, I down­graded my Net­flix sub­scrip­tion to stream­ing only ($8 a month). I also sub­scribe to Hulu­Plus; also $8 a month. I already have Prime on my Ama­zon account, so I don’t count that in my monthly, post-cable expenses. I will rely on Red­Box or Block­buster Kiosk for any future DVD rentals — about $1/rental. There are also a bevy of  movie stream­ing ser­vices, such as Vudu that have just-out-of-theater releases.

Anten­nas

Of course, stream­ing con­tent isn’t all I had to think about. I also had to think about  pick­ing up anten­nas to receive over-the-air (OTA) high-definition broad­casts. There is a great web­site called Anten­naWeb, that lets you plug in your zip code and it pro­duces a list of all the sta­tions in your area. From there, you can deter­mine what type of antenna you’ll need. Now, I didn’t want to go all old school and bolt a big antenna to the roof (though it may be the best thing you can do for a clear signal).

Instead, I picked up an antenna from Radio Shack ($25), a cou­ple of RCA uni-directional anten­nas from Best Buy ($30 each), and an ampli­fied GE antenna from Micro­Cen­ter ($45). The ampli­fied antenna doesn’t seem to pro­vide any addi­tional chan­nels, and I ques­tion the addi­tional cost. If you’re not famil­iar with over the air HD broad­casts, you notice that chan­nels will pix­e­late (get choppy) or com­pletely go out, as opposed to ana­log chan­nels merely get­ting fuzzy, if the sig­nal is not strong. Addi­tion­ally, it appears that cer­tain things will inter­fere with the sig­nal — such as mov­ing around in the room, or pass­ing trains (we live near mass tran­sit and freight rail tracks). I am still research­ing indoor anten­nas. I just can’t bring myself to go with an attic mounted or roof mounted antenna. It’s not worth it, to me, for a few extra chan­nels. Based on my obser­va­tion, I don’t think you even need a “HD” antenna or any­thing too spec­tac­u­lar unless you live in a rural area or in the city with a lot of tall build­ings nearby. Here’s a video (part 2) of a guy who made an antenna with a CD jewel case and binder clips. Nat­u­rally, I’m gonna try mak­ing one to see if it works. I’ve saved my receipts, just in case the binder clip antenna works out, thought I don’t think I would sit it promi­nently on the man­tel like the kid did in the video.

Internet/Broadband

The last piece of my cord cut­ting was pick­ing up my own router. I have been pay­ing RCN $4.95 a month — dubbed a “home net­work­ing fee” — for years to rent a pretty basic Linksys G-band modem/router. It’s done the job, but I’ve paid for this thing many times over. I can’t even explain why I never bought my own router, but I fig­ured there was no bet­ter time to make that pur­chase than going all Inter­net in the house. As with any­thing else, I researched WiFi routers to death. I solicited advice from friends and acquain­tances on Face­book and Google+. After way too much read­ing and hand wring­ing, I nar­rowed my list down to the Netgear,N900,  the Linksys 4200 and the Apple Air­Port Extreme Base Sta­tion. They are comparably-priced, dual-band N routers. I decided on the Air­Port Extreme Base Sta­tion, sim­ply because I have Apple com­put­ers in the house, and I’ve heard and read that the Base Sta­tion com­mu­ni­cates bet­ter. *Shrug* Who knows.

As I men­tioned ear­lier in the post, I bumped up my Inter­net speed plan from 15Mbps to 25Mbps. Unfor­tu­nately, this is one area in my cable cut­ting adven­ture that did not go off with­out a hitch. I got home the evening I returned all the RCN equip­ment and plugged in the new cable modem. As soon as I fired up the modem and con­nected it to my com­puter, I pointed my browser to Speedtest.net. I imme­di­ately noticed that my down­load speeds were well below my 25Mbps plan. In fact, I wasn’t get­ting speeds any­where close to what I got under the 15Mbps plan. Mind you, I have not con­nected my router yet. These are speeds directly from the RCN-provide Cisco 2100 cable modem. I jump on the phone with the RCN tech sup­port. I am asked to power cycle my  modem, and check the cables to make sure they’re tight. After doing all of that, I get speeds near 22-23MBps. Ok. I’m good. Not more than 30 min­utes late, while con­nect­ing the router, I noticed that the speeds have dropped off again. A return call to RCN doesn’t prove as suc­cess­ful as the first call, and I’m told that a tech­ni­cian will need to come out. *THUD*

Fast for­ward to the tech­ni­cian arriv­ing at my house a few days later, on time at least. He does a few checks, and then gets on the phone with some­one. Within a few min­utes, the per­son on the phone reveals that there is no prob­lem with my line, con­nec­tion or equip­ment. No. The prob­lem was that some­one didn’t code my account prop­erly to release the faster band­width. It was a cod­ing error. Ugh! Since the fix of the code on the account, my speed is where it should be. This speed test was per­formed over WiFi on my Mac­Book Pro.

I shared all of this as a bit of a pre­cau­tion­ary tale. If you’re con­sid­er­ing cut­ting your cable, or sim­ply bump­ing up the speed on your Inter­net ser­vice, make sure that you ask the CRS you ini­tially work with, or tech sup­port if you encounter an issue, to make sure that your account is coded prop­erly. Appar­ently, this is not all that uncommon.

Ini­tial Impressions

I’ve only had the cord cut for about five days now, so I can only give you an ini­tial impres­sion. I would be lying if I said that it hasn’t been an adjust­ment. I am some­one that’s always had a pretty robust cable lineup, and the first few days in the house with­out some of my favorite chan­nels was a lit­tle rough. For­tu­nately, you can find a lot of con­tent online and through stream­ing ser­vices. What is amaz­ing, though, is how quickly I watch much less tele­vi­sion. Of course, it’s by force; but it does make me real­ize how often I was look­ing at TV, but  not really watch­ing any­thing. The TV always seemed to be on. Since the end of last week, I’ve noticed and appre­ci­ate the quiet. It makes room for the sound of my favorite music, and has made me think about a lot of other things that I’d like to accom­plish. With­out the dis­trac­tion of the TV, I’ve been more productive.

I can this – cut­ting the cable is not for every­one. I’m not going to become some anti-television evan­ge­list. I’m just some­one who got tired of pour­ing money, month-after-month, into RCN’s pock­ets for a lot of ser­vices I didn’t really use. There are a lot of good cord cut­ting resources online. I started with arti­cles and videos on GigaOm, and still fre­quent the site for tips and sug­ges­tions. Nat­u­rally, I am happy to act as a resource for any­one inter­est­ing in cut­ting the cord.

I would love to hear from you, too.

• Have you cut the cord?
• If so, what led to your decision?
• What equip­ment do you use?
• What ser­vices do you use?
• What type of Inter­net plan do you have?
• Do you still have a land line?