It has been six months since mak­ing the deci­sion to ‘cut the cord’ in our house. In that time, I think that we have all pretty much adjusted to life with­out cable. I sus­pect that it’s a lot eas­ier for Noah and Carla because they both spend most of their time else­where with full-blown cable — Noah at his mom’s house, and Carla in her apart­ment in New York. I, how­ever, am the one who has been func­tion­ing daily with­out cable. For the most part, all is well. The one thing that has been dri­ving me nuts, though, is the less-than-stellar (read: shitty) recep­tion. The pri­mary issue, as I’ve dis­cussed, is that the recep­tion will either become pix­e­lated or com­pletely go out. Ini­tially, I thought the prob­lem was only when freight trains passed by the house, but I have dis­cov­ered that poor recep­tion is not exclu­sive to CSX inter­fer­ence. Poor recep­tion has become a rather reg­u­lar, and quite annoy­ing, thing.

I am unwill­ing to put a big ass antena on top of the house, or some huge wire con­trap­tion in the attic. Hon­estly, for the sake of receiv­ing a hand­ful of sta­tions, con­nect­ing any­thing more than small, unob­tru­sive anten­nas is out of the ques­tion. What to do? I must admit that one night when recep­tion get blink­ing out, I came about —>this<— close to call­ing up RCN to get the mack-daddy cable pack­age. For­tu­nately, fis­cal restraint took over and just kept mov­ing the antenna around until I could get a steady sig­nal. The chan­nel was clear (full HD to all of those who have been mak­ing jokes about the qual­ity of over-the-air broad­casts), but I could no longer focus on the show because I sat, pissed, look­ing at the antenna jerry-rigged over the top of one of the pocket doors. Terms like: Janky, Ghetto, and FAIL! came to mind when I looked at what I had to do just to watch Jeopardy.

Per­haps it was time to rethink the whole “cut­ting the cord” thing.

Side­bar: Let me make some­thing clear. Just because I post on my blog about trav­el­ing in one direc­tion, doesn’t mean that I won’t, or can’t, change my mind. Even with that said, though, I did won­der what peo­ple would say if I went back to cable. Oh well…who cares? I have do what’s right for me (and my family).

A cou­ple of weeks ago, I saw a stripped down cable and Inter­net pack­age on RCN’s New York page while I was look­ing at some options for Carla. (She is fed up with Time Warner, and we talked about her switch­ing to RCN.) I looked on RCN’s DC web­site, and didn’t see that pack­age. Hav­ing reached the point where I just couldn’t live with the ter­ri­ble recep­tion in the house, I reluc­tantly started to peruse RCN’s web­site to see what was the most inex­pen­sive bun­dle pack­age. While on the site, I just hap­pened to click on “Spe­cial Offers.” Well looky here.

For the same price I am pay­ing now for 50Mbps cable Inter­net ser­vice, I could be con­nected to a steady sig­nal for local sta­tions. I see this as a way to still “cut the cord;” because, essen­tially, I am just using RCN as my antenna. Seman­tics? Per­haps. You know what? You can call it what you want to, but I this move as a win-win. I still have my high speed Inter­net, needed for stream­ing ser­vices and mul­ti­ple users, and I get crys­tal clear recep­tion of all the local chan­nels I was using my anten­nas to receive. Noth­ing more. The total dif­fer­ence is cost per month? $3 (taxes)

One other thing worth not­ing in this update is a chan­nel that I added to my Roku account. If you have cut the cable, and would like to add some stream­ing of online con­tent, you should seri­ously con­sider adding Plex.

Plex works on a num­ber of devices. Note: You will need to install Plex’s Media Server soft­ware on your com­puter to make it all work. The process is really easy, and I’ve been able to enjoy con­tent from ESPN3, ABC, CBS, and YouTube. Most recently, I was able to watch all of the NBA play­offs that aired on ESPN3 on my TV, instead of sit­ting at my com­puter, watch­ing on my lap­top, or try­ing to run and HDMI cable between the lap­top and the TV. You can also use the media server to stream pho­tos and videos from your com­puter to your Plex chan­nel or app. Speak­ing of apps, you can pick up the Plex app for Android and iOS devices, which, I think, runs around $5. Here is a video by Janko Roettgers of GigaOm’s Cord Cut­ters demon­strat­ing Plex.

Thanks to my friend Carol leav­ing a com­ment on this post, I was prompted me to come back to add a note about our home phone. Part of the cord cut­ting expe­ri­ence included port­ing our home phone num­ber over to an extra Ver­i­zon Wire­less line I had on my account. That line was set to come off con­tract in April, so I sat patiently, wait­ing for the con­tract to expire. Sure, I could have paid the pro-rated early ter­mi­na­tion fee (about $40), but why? I set a reminder on my Google Apps cal­en­dar. On April 30th, I signed into Google Voice, and went through the steps for port­ing the home num­ber over from Ver­i­zon Wireless.

I already have a Google Voice num­ber, but that num­ber is asso­ci­ated with my fledg­ling pho­tog­ra­phy busi­ness. My wife uses two Google Voice num­bers for her busi­ness. I assigned the home num­ber to my per­sonal email (run with Google Apps). A while back, I had given up on Google Voice as my daily mobile num­ber, prin­ci­pally because it lacks MMS (image and video) mes­sag­ing. As a home num­ber, though, Google Voice is perfect.

Here’s how we make hav­ing a Google Voice num­ber work in our house. I bought a Pana­sonic cord­less phone sys­tem, with Blue­tooth inte­gra­tion, off a guy on Craigslist.

The key to this sys­tem is Blue­tooth. I can con­nect two blue­tooth mobile phones to the Pana­sonic sys­tem — essen­tially cre­at­ing a home phone. As soon as I walk into the house, my phone auto­mat­i­cally con­nects to the Pana­sonic base. I can receive and place calls through the three head­sets, as if call­ing from my cell. With the Google Voice app on my phone, any calls that come into the “home phone” num­ber ring through my cell and all of the Pana­sonic hand­sets. I have the app set to show the Google Voice num­ber so that any­one in the house will know whether it’s a call to the home num­ber or my cell num­ber. I lose Caller ID with con­fig­u­ra­tion, but I don’t mind giv­ing that up for the con­ve­nience of hav­ing both my cell and Google Voice num­bers ring through the phone. I can always set the Google Voice app to show the incom­ing num­ber if it really became impor­tant. When Carla is home, she can also have her phone ring through the Pana­sonic sys­tem. I have devel­oped the habit of putting my smart­phone down by the base to charge when I come into the house.
 
If you have any ques­tions about cut­ting the cord, or life with­out cable, please ask them in the comments.