I am in somewhat of a quandary as to which is the better choice, cable or satellite TV.

SORRY FOR SO LONG, please bear with me.

We have had plain old cable TV for years and years, wonderful picture and sound quality, no extra equipment needed such as "boxes".

As it currently is, I, all by myself, can easily cut, splice, add splitters, re-route, etc. and put a TV in any place I choose, and as many as I choose, without involving the phone/cable company, nor having to waste a couple days sitting around the house waiting for some phone company guy.

I built this place myself, cut the trees, sawed the lumber, etc., all by myself plus a few inlaws once in a while.

Every bit of the phone, TV, and computer wiring was installed by ME.

All the phone company did was connect to the wires that I left hanging out the wall by the meter-base; they never set foot in my house.


As it currently is, no special "box" is necessary and I can watch a different channel on a dozen different TVs, all loud and clear, and change the channels right on the TV.

Likewise the internet, which is on the same old-style copper-wire cable that the TV is on; I have two separate computers that work completely independent of each other, and I could have a dozen more if I wished, and connect them all by myself.


Likewise the phones in nearly every room, including bathrooms, shop, barns, etc., all bought and paid for by me and all wired up by me.



NOW, the reason for my question.


The dumb phone company, amidst the biggest financial crisis of their history, and losing business to cell-phones more and more every day, has been rewiring the entire county with some silly "fiberoptic" cable.

The say that we have no choice in this and must let them install it.

They have not yet gotten to my side of the county, thank goodness.

Everyone I have talked to that the company has already switched over wishes they had never had to do so; they are very disappointed with the quality of TV, compared to the old cable; phones constantly crackle, cut-out, and drop calls; and internet service is slow, draggy, and subject to go out at all times.


To add insult to all this, EVERY TV, computer, and telephone MUST have some sort of "box" that only the phone company can install.

The "box" has it's own remote that only operates the box and changes channels.

No longer can an individual run a wire to move or add a TV, computer, or phone.

I figure that, once they get everyone re-wired to the new system, they will start charging a fee for each extra phone, computer, and TV.

Every "improvement" that has came along in the last few years has not delivered as promised.

It is a proven fact that the old-school system is superior to this new stuff; it can do stuff that the new stuff cannot, such as permit independent watching of numerous TVs with no special equipment and the ability to add many phones with the only tool necessary being a screw-driver; why on earth would they spend millions of dollars to force a change for the worse that is only dis-heartening and losing long-time customers ??


Besides everyone having negative issues with the new system and components, they have hired a bunch of jail-bird-looking outsiders, who nobody knows, who schedule a few days to come into your home and install all this new wire and stuff.

Everyone I have talked to says they make a complete mess of the install, stapling visible wires along base-boards and walls, drilling and knocking holes wherever it is easiest for them, skuffing painted walls, tracking mud all over, etc., etc.




Myself, I am seriously considering just dropping my long-term relationship with the local phone company and going with satellite for the TVs and computers.


I can do without a phone.


What are you guys ideas on the situation; will I be happy with switching to satellite; or, would I be better off to just swallow the bad taste and let the phone company trash my house and over-charge us ??


I have almost convinced myself that I can live without all three and put that money every month to better use.

Of course, that last option would make my forum visits few and far apart.


Thanks for reading my rant.

 

You didnt mention if you have cell phone service in your area. That might make a difference on the phone and internet.
Unfortunately its the computers that might be your big hurdle. If you use a lot of band you will still (probably) be better off with the phone company.

In the TV's--dont let them push you around. If you can get any sort of a Southern view from your place in KY you should be able to get Dish or Direct at a very reasonable price compaired to cable. I installed my dish in 1996 (the first in our area) and have been happy with it ever since.
If your new TV system is going to require a "box" in every TV room anyway, than go with satellite. You can get by with one DVR reciever for a couple of TV's and play them back when you want to.
I am still very happy with my "normal" (seems high def) signal from my dish boxes and dont plan on upgrading to HD.
PS: I am not pushing Dish over the other sat people its just that I am used to them and have absolutely nothing bad to say about their product.

 

If you have cell service, and I mean *IF* .....

We use cell phones for backup and Vonage as our primary home phone number. This makes our phone service, Internet, and cable TV are the only thing coming into the house via a single RG-58 cable.

We've been using Vonage since 2005 and it's been fantastic. Normally just to have a phone turned on in our area it's $55 a month before we even use it; Vonage runs me $32 a month and I get all the add-on features for free like caller ID, voice mail, call forwarding/special call forwarding (rings 3 times then forwards to external line like cell phone), call waiting, etc.. We also use a 2.4GHz cordless phone setup with base station so we could have a phone in every room if we wanted. Right now it's just my office, the kitchen, the master bedroom, and the living room.

All of the internet stuff is on battery backup (cable modem, Linksys router, Vonage adapter) and the only times we've experienced an outage was when the cable company had an issue, mostly due to weather hence the cell phone backup.

Our cable provider offers different speeds for internet and we're using the 20Mb service. We can talk on the phone, surf the web, and stream movies from NetFlix without a single hiccup.



-Kris

 

Thats neat stuff. Glad you posted it. I have never looked into Vonage since I dont have cable out here but BearKiller might be able to use it. I still think Sat TV is the better deal (for TV) but I dont have any other options.

 

I don't understand; what is "Vonage", cable or satellite ??

The local phone company, supposedly a "co-op" but more like a Mafia organization, has an un-breakable monopoly in the entire area, such that any cable services are either through them or nothing; there is NO cable competition, nor is it allowed.

By "Dish" you are meaning Dish Network, right ??

I am fairly certain we can get them in our area.


Not everywhere in the county by a long shot, as it is very 3rd-world and rural, has any cell service at all; HOWEVER, where we live are really good signals due to us sort of being centered between three recently built towers; five miles in any direction from our house and a cell-phone is useless for a long way before it starts working again.


Just for comparison purposes, and probably somewhat cheaper than many regions simply due to Kentucky being such a low per-capita income state, with the majority of our residents being either working for minimum-wage (or less), permanently job-less, on Welfare or some other fixed income, or starving on some family farm, I asked the wife just how much total we were currently paying for standard no-frills telephone, medium-speed internet, and the cheapest cable-TV package with maybe twenty actual channels and many more shop-at-home channels (useless and should not have to be paid for).

The package we get is the least expensive package that includes all three services, cable-TV, cable-internet, and standard telephone, total payment is right at $150/month.

I could do big things with $1800 per year.


Thanks so much and keep the ideas and opinions coming.

 

We have had Direct tv for 8 years now, and been happy with the service. Once the dish is installed, and run thru a switch box (splitter), you can move the boxes around. The remotes, also work the tv, DVD player, and VHS player. We have 2 dishes, one on the house, and one in the fifthwheel. We keep one box in the 5ver, and the other 3 in the house. When we travel, we snag the DVR box from the livingroom, and my daughter's box and tv from her bedroom. Once we get the 5ver set up, and the dish set up, we can watch different channels, in each room. Each box over the first one, is only $6 a month. We have the Verizon wireless dsl for our computers, and the wife and I have cell phones, no home phone.

 

Vonage is a residential version of Voice over IP (VoIP), similar to Skype, Magic Jack, and the free Google Phone app inside Google Mail.

It allows you to use your existing phones so all you need is an internet connection.

The cool part is you can use it anywhere you can plug it into ..... like hotels, friends and family with high speed internet, etc..


www.vonage.com




-Kris

 

Bear, what part of Ky?

We have wireless Internet and absolutely LOVE it, no phone lines required, and are on the slow plan, and it is plenty fast, always on, etc. It is 35 bucks a month.

How close are you to a major city? I might even be tempted to dump the Satellite, we have not had either for 7 years despite being 100 plus miles from Chicago, have not really missed anything. I manage 25 plus channels now that Digital is here, and actually have better TV than my sister who is on Direct, other than things like the History channel, etc.

It isn't for everyone, but I really love not having the few live braincells that I have left sucked out every time I turn on the tube.........

 

These days, the providers are realizing that they can no longer compete with just the basic phone and cable service. Landline phones are steadily being replaced by wireless and VoIP services. Basic cable is being replaced by satellite with all the extra features that it has. They're rolling out fiber networks to be able to supply more advanced services. Most of the providers I work with are all about triple play (voice, video and internet) or quad play (voice, video, internet and wireless phone), no one wants to be a single service provider anymore.

I don't know all the specifics of what is being rolled out in your area, but most implementations I've seen do not require any special hardware for each individual phone or computer. Generally you will have a Network Interface Device (NID) on the outside of the residence that terminates the fiber connection. When we had Verizon's fiber service at our last house, the NID outside tied directly into the existing phone wiring to provide phone service. Beyond that point, I had the freedom to do what I wanted with the phone wiring. The video and internet services were provided from the NID via coax cable that was tied into the existing coax in the house. For internet service, they had a combination modem/wireless router that was connected to one of the coax drops. I connected this device into my existing Ethernet network that was already in place to serve my existing computers. I could add as many Ethernet drops as I wanted with no extra hardware or intervention from Verizon.

The TVs will each have a receiver, since this is going to be the device that provides you with the advanced features they are delivering (or will deliver in the future). Generally, they provide universal remotes with their receivers so that you can control your TV and the receiver with the same box. If you have a full home theater setup, then you either have multiple remotes already or there are a number of fully programmable universal remotes that will control all devices.

I don't want to sound like I'm trying to sell you on their services, just wanted to give a different viewpoint.

 

1. Yes, Dish Network, but DirectTV is pretty much the same.
2. $150 a month is about what we are currently paying for Sat/phone/internet.

Like patdaly If I could get broadcast TV in my area, I would drop the Sat TV.

Who do you have it through. My parents only have dial up, highest speed is 28kps (when lucky) and needs an extra phone line to boot. I would gladly fork out 35/40 bucks a month to get them a faster connection.

A couple of years ago, I did a trial run in CA with a Verizon air card. It worked ok at my parents place but if you exceeded 2 gig in data, they charged .25 cents per megabite. I didnt come close to going over but my Mom couldnt handle the strain of knowing that if she goofed up she could go over the limit and the megabites do add up quick.

Oh! I made several calls to Verizon asking them if they could shut off service to the card if it went over. They said they lacked the capability. Its kind of funny though since they have the ability to start charging you extra the minute you do go over.

 

One of the actual phone company boss technicians was in the shop a few days ago and I picked his brain.

He said that, if plain old phone service is all that was in the home/business, then a box could be mounted on the outside wall and the existing phone wire tied into that.


I asked him why not thus with the TV and internet and he said NO, each unit MUST have a special box inside AT the unit.


Every so-called improvement they have made over the last few years has made things worse, instead of better.



I just picked up some laminated cards from a big stack of them laying on a table at the restuarant today.

I have not yet read all the fine-print.


It is a double-sided card that says DIREC-TV on one side and windstreamforever on the other.

DIREC-TV :

over 200 channels

FREE equipment

FREE installation

FREE premium movies

FREE HD channels


The same low price starting at $29.99/month forever and ever and ever.


windstreamforever.com :


High-Speed internet and UNLIMITED Home Phone Service


The same low price forever and ever and ever, $49.99(it does not say "per month", it just says $49.99)



I am centrally located about 100-crow-miles in all directions from any decent sized town.


Some of the guys at work have plain old antennaes and some sort of required digital box and on a good day with perfect conditions, they can get get two "local" stations, plus two differing KET/PBS stations and that is it.


When I was a kid, we had a very impressive many-sectioned TV antennae tower, set deeply into concrete, reaching scary-high up into the elements, with a whole bunch of signal improvement gizmos; plus, we lived on one of the highest points around.

The bottom three-legged section was about five-feet between each of the three legs, with little X-braces going all the way up, each successive X sharing the bolts with the adjacent one, above and below it.


Each section got progressively smaller in the spread of the legs, as the galvanized tower gradually tapered into the clouds.


Leaning way back and looking skyward, toward the impressive-looking antannae at the top, would put one's head to swimming and make you have night-mares of falling off from up there all night, but never landing, just continuously falling.


There was a clicker buzz-box on the TV-set, with the four compass points marked out, plus the intermediates.

Turning that dial to a different compass point would result in a loud BUZZ-click --- BUZZ-click, as the little red indicator hand caught up with the red stripe on the **** that points to the desired direction.


If you were outside, you could hear a motor slowly notching along, and see the actual antannae lurch jerkily around to the newly selected direction.



One would have thought, with such an impressive array of equipment, that one could have intercepted signals from a Russian Sputnik or overheard incrypted conversations from submarines, thousands of feet beneath the ocean's surface.


The truth of the matter is that we could barely see four channels, three of them so snowy that, if that is the best we could do these days, we would just turn the TV off and find something else to do.


On a windy day, forget it.

Yet, we would sit in the floor for hours, eyes and ears glued to that snowy jerky black-and-white screen, with constant dark lines rolling across the screen, straining to hear about JFK getting shot, real news footage about what was going on in Viet Nam, Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, and I Dream of Genie.


And those were the good old days.

 

free to air for tv,comp.on ph line100.0 mbps connection,going to wireless comp. wireless only works well if you have good cell ph. service they are putting up a new tower and when its done its wireless.

 

Wow, I can understand the box at every TV since everyone has gone to a receiver/set top box. But having a unit at every PC just seems odd. Once they drop you an Ethernet port, it should be up to you to do whatever you want with it. If you want to drop a router on it and build a whole network in your house, that's your business. All you should really be paying for is the bandwidth they're providing.

If you're going with DirecTV, make sure you get as much as you might possibly want during the initial install. After the fact, you're looking at charges to get a receiver for each TV you add. They also have install charges depending on what you're adding after the initial install.

For example, DirecTV has rolled out a new service called "Whole Home DVR" which allows you to watch programs recorded on your DVR from any TV in the house. It wasn't available when we did our original install. I called to see about getting this added and discovered that it would run about $450 to have it "installed". When I asked why the installation was so expensive, they said that it covered installing a new dish, new coax drops and new receivers. Since I was recently installed, I already had the new dish and new receivers and all of my coax was already in place. All I really need is the new device that connects at the back of the receiver. They won't send just this device, the only option they give you is paying the full installation price, even if there is no work to be done.

 

I use these people.

http://www.airlogic.net/

No affiliation with any cell phone provider, you may want to look around locally for the same thing, they are popping up all over the US.

 

Thanks! Im looking into it.