I've been bitching about the amount of money I spend on cable, etc forever and I finally start working on cutting the cord. My son and I had a conversation last year, he was 9 at the time, about why when he watches a show on Netflix it is only 22 minutes long but on TV it's 30 minutes long. I was like "AWESOME question!" and we proceeded to talk about that missing 8 minutes being commercials that we pay to watch. We started running averages of, say, 2 hours of TV per day rounds DOWN to 30 minutes of nothing but commercials EVERY DAY! Multiply that by 300 days per year (pretending that 20% of the time a day goes by with no TV, just for example purposes) and we're talking 150 hours per year of COMMERCIALS!
So that conversation got him on board with my master plan to reduce my cable expenses. At the time I was paying $255/mo for a Triple-Play package (Internet, Cable, and VOIP) including $10/mo just for a modem rental! Plus I'm already paying for Netflix and Prime. I also have heard TONS of horror stories about people who have attempted to ease out of the Comcrap organization, with literally months if not years of billing issues, I certainly wanted to approach this with the least amount of hassle.
So, first the hardware. I bough a new cable modem, a Motorola SB6141, for about $70 (7 months worth of rental fees to Comcast). However, before installing this I needed to get my phone moved. For this I chose Ooma. I paid $90 (at Newegg) for an Ooma device which also came with a free TP-LINK TL-WR940N wireless router. I was already in the market for a replacement router so this was a good deal for me (there are often Ooma deals, especially if you can get a referral from an existing member, like me
). The thing with Ooma is you buy the hardware once then you don't pay for the service, you just pay the monthly state/federal taxes and fees. For me this amounts to about $4.37 month and this is applicable whether I have Ooma, Comcast, or Vonage for my VOIP (landline substitute) phone service. Then that's it, no more phone bill for a savings of $15.00/month which pays for the Ooma device in 6 months.
The trick is to transfer the number from Comcast first. This way you aren't contending with VOIP supporting hardware. However, once the phone number is taken off the triple-play package then the billing goes up and is prorated on a per day basis! My bill went from $255 to $266 when I removed phone service!
Next, replace the cable modem. It's easy and you can do it yourself with the web based configuration interface. Now I was poised to save $25/mo simply by not renting my modem or paying for my phone anymore.
Finally, the most CRUCIAL step. Disconnect all Comcast hardware, put it in a box nice and clean, and bring it to your local Comcast (or other company) office. DON'T CANCEL OVER THE PHONE OR OVER THE INTERNET CHAT!!!!!! This is important, they WILL screw up your billing and you still have to bring your stuff to the office anyway. Show up at the Comcast office with all your hardware and work with the customer rep IN PERSON to remove EVERYTHING but internet from the account including the modem rental that you won't need any longer. Smile a lot, be friendly and you might even get some bonus bandwidth - just saying, it happens here all the time
When all is said and done, my next bill will be $85 and that will be for 150Mb cable Internet. This will be a net savings of $170/month. The first two months savings pays for ALL of my up front hardware costs as well as a 1 year code for Hulu Plus which my wife wants so she can watch current shows, and I'm also shopping for an HD Antenna, in this neck of the woods we can pick up about 10 or so channels OTA.
For the TV's we have that aren't Smart TV's I bought Kindle Fire Stick's. There is even an extra cable you can buy to power the stick from local USB on the TV which eliminates a power cable, this is an extra $13 but is worth it if you have power space or run constraints (wall mounted, etc).
The following months savings I'm considering applying toward a basic HTPC build. With this I'll run Kodi (XBMC) and uTorrent with RSS feeds setup to mimic a DVR - although I know it's different, the function and end result will be the same to the other users in the house.
I'll read back over this later to make sure I didn't miss anything but if anyone has any questions, has interest in Ooma or getting an Ooma referral, etc feel free to post here. Also, I would love to hear what others are doing to "cut the cord"!
XII
