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We had ATT DSL  and Directv satellite for the last 11 years and it was really terrible , every time it rains we would loose TV , the last internet outage was 22 days , ATT customer service sucks to say the lease , so bite the bullet and had a cable bored  to the house ----- ATT wanted $8,000 to do this job , Spectrum said $4,960 and then said they would come up with $3,000 , so it was $1,960 to do this  job  , 475 ft of main vein cable , the next crew is going to bury the line from there to the house , third crew runs it in the house to 7 TVs and 3 computers  , next Tuesday is the completion date --- the monthly bill is going to be much cheaper , more speed , more options and a land line phone 

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I feel your pain with ATT.   We dumped them and went elsewhere.  I'm lucky enough to be within range of a fixed wireless internet tower.  Only 25mpbs but with a firestick on two TVs and just the two of us we are fine.

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I have had charter spectrum for the last 5 years or so for internet only. It started at 45 a month for 100mb then went to 55 and now after all the promos have ended, it's monthy is 69.00.

The nice thing though is we only have sling tv which is an internet streaming tv service for 30 a month. So out total monthly bill for tv and internet is $100. which has always been my goal to stay under for the combination.

I've had one 4 hour outage in the last 3 years with charter spectrum. I can't complain about that.

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22 minutes ago, 56Sierra said:

I feel your pain with ATT.   We dumped them and went elsewhere.  I'm lucky enough to be within range of a fixed wireless internet tower.  Only 25mpbs but with a firestick on two TVs and just the two of us we are fine.

I looked into a cellular internet connection , they were offering speeds of 50 , which was much better than the DSL service  we have / soon to be had , the monthly bill was going to be about the same , TV was my biggest concern , when you live in a hurricane zone , it is nice to have the local weather station available to monitor where the 'cane is at --- they say this cable is going to give me 200 speed and I can upgrade to 400 if wanted 

 

Spectrum is offering $45 per line Verizon tower cell service , unlimited calls and unlimited data to customers who have internet service  , ATT has us at 9 per month for data combined on two phones and $60 per phone , soon to say see you later ATT cellular 

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We looked at cellular too but their data caps if you watched TV were so low it wasn't feasible.   Spectrum would have been the way to go but one person told me installation would be free, the next said $4,000.  I even offered to run the cable myself but they would have none of that.

My county is considered Appalachia due to the poor economy so the government paid for a fixed wireless system to be installed here.  Like any .gov plan the overall cost was millions to the tax payers and very few actually benefited from it.  I got lucky enough to be in range. 

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Congrats on getting real Internet Fishfiles! You are about to be set free! :-)

 

I was stuck with hotspotting from my phone to my laptop (I hacked my phone to avoid paying extra hotspotting fees) for many years, so I have an idea the sort of non-internet that you have been living with. My phone plan was capped at 5gb data per month and Verizon throttled the speed back every day during peak usage periods, on my cheap 4g cellular phone plan. There were no other choices available to me since I am so remote (1.25 miles from the nearest utilities as a crow flies), so I had to learn to live with little or no Internet access at times. I had just enough data allowance each month to perform a bit of work, hangout on this forum and do my personal business, but no extra data for streaming teevee, youtube learning or other entertainment.

 

Then T-Mobile began to expand into the UP and they erected a new 4G & 5G tower about 15 miles from me. That brought my phone & Internet choices up to three finally.... Verizon 4G, AT&T 4G or the latest greatest T-Mo 4G/5G. So I applied for T-Mo's Testdrive 30 days tryout program and wow! I learned that T-Mo rips compared to Verizon! So I bought a new unlocked phone that I could hack on easily and signed up for T-Mo Magenta Max unlimited everything phone plan that includes 40GB of hotspot data per month, with no hacking on my phone required! :-)

I was freed up a bunch at that point, but I still could not stream Internet teevee, watch any baseball games or watch my favorite racing channels, except on my phone screen... ain't no fun in that.

 

T-Mo came to my rescue again though, when they began a pilot program which offered true unlimited (no data caps, no deprioritization throttling) 5G Home Internet service aimed at providing fast 5G Internet to rural folks like myself, for only $50 per month with no equipment costs and no added taxes or fees. So I jumped on the offer in January and received the 4G/5G 4x4 MIMO modem from T-Mo in February. I swapped the SMPS modem power supply for a syncronous DC/DC converter, so the 5G modem is powered by my solar like everything else that I own.

 

Now I have not owned a teevee since the 2000 Bush election fiasco... and I wanted a big screen for my laptop (my old eyes are failing) more than I ever wanted a teevee! So I bought a high-perf Gigabyte M27Q 27" gaming monitor with an IPS screen and KVM that also does beautiful 4K/60 video and is powered by 19 volts DC... and hooked that new monitor up to my solar with a DC/DC converter as well. The 27" monitor serves double-duty as a big, high resolution, high refresh rate screen for my laptop and also provides me with a 4K video streaming teevee on a beautiful IPS screen with an Android TV dongle plugged into one of the HDMI ports, which I expanded by adding a USB-C hub and 128GB of extra storage for apps. I added a 200 watts class-D 2.1 Bluetooth AptX/HD amplifier powered by a 480 watts DC/DC converter and connected the amp to the Android TV dongle with an HDMI/Optical Dolby audio decoder, then I mounted 4 12" infinite-baffle subwoofers into my living room wall and wired up the subs and my old-school tower speakers to the amp. So the Android teevee dongle sends Dolby audio to the 2.1 amp with an optical cable and my laptop and phone sends AptX/HD audio to the amp. My phone can Chromecast to the teevee dongle via WiFi as well, so I ended up with lots of music and video streaming options and can view my phone screen on the monitor too.

 

T-Mo offers lots of free stuff to subscribers too, so I have MLB TV premium for free now, so I watch the Tigers games and any other games I care to watch every day for nothing. T-Mo offers Netflix standard for free or Netflix premium 4K for only $5 per month extra, so I got that too, along with Amazon Prime video, although I never watch either of them. Youtube has lots of my favorite dirt track racing events on every week and I hacked on my Android teevee dongle a bit, so I now have 100s of additional streaming teevee channels available for nothing.

 

Real Internet definitely will change your world Fishfiles! Congrats!!!

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Retro , sound like you have a serious set up going on , glad you got an upgrade ,I know it has been good to  see your presence a lot more on the forums lately 

 

I am a little worried , was thinking about it last night " every action has an opposite reaction " , I wonder how much my sound systems is going to be effected by this change , Tuesday is the day , going to have to play hooky from work so I can give the installation tech a headache , LOL 

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We’re rural. We have att fixed wireless - there’s a cell tower about 400 yards away. We’ve had it about 2.5 years and have never went over our data cap. We canceled dish so our only source of television is streaming. $50/mo. If I ever change it will be to spacex starlink. But apparently it’s priced at 100/month. 
 

 

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att is not known, for consumer contact, an try to avoid it. talk to a machine, first, then get nowhere. t-mobile when it first came out, a while back had better service, an reception. i dont know how they are now. 2000.-2021. i still have the phone. same battery.. i just keep it for old phone numbers. the buttons are shot for the must part. ever so often, i can find the old numbers. so, i still keep the phone..

what i watch with, satellite TV from, att, i can get from an antenna, outside.. granted, ever so often a newer movie, shows up for a week.,, then disappears, only if, ya got attention, will you see it. in the long run, outside is more interesting, an entertaining,,. plus, ya aint call gotta nobody,..

Who ya gonna call??

though, att basic satellite does, put out 1 movie a year, for a couple of weeks, the local library, has plenty, an it dont cost nothing. the best plan is, to go on the weekend, if ya get up early, is one day extra, on a long weekend, as a holiday, could be two, or three day's.. though, the gov likes to limit holidays, for the most part.. ya might get used to the extra time.. forbid, you enjoy, your condition.. way of living.. if ya do, we can change that... an they do

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sad to admit, but  I actually work for Charter/Spectrum. (and no, I can't get you free cable...LOL)

it's a crappy company behind the scenes...leaching off of what was a very robust datacenter when we were Time Warner.

Hard to find another position with another company at my pay rate and my age, so I'm stuck for a couple more years til I'm ready to retire.

 

that said, I actually live out-of-footprint, so even I don't get to enjoy free cable service. I do get free TV lineup at least but I seldom watch TV. I stream content from various providers and we keep disney app for the grankids, but that's about it.

I'm on the move a good bit for recreation, so I keep a hotspot mifi with me with a very high gb plan and that does fine. If I think I'm going to want to watch movies from the camper etc, I preload them to my ipad for viewing on the larger flatscreen TV in the camper.

 

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Just switched over to Starlink, I have no cell reception and can not get a land line.  Unlimited data; needed to purchase their dish $800, and $144 a month, a bit of an outlay but much better than previous deal.

 PING ms
32
 DOWNLOAD Mbps
189.51
 UPLOAD Mbps
15.18


Previous supplier - went to watch hockey - in 5 minutes of clock time had 3 minutes and 8 seconds of buffing- cancelled and then Starlink became available here; big improvement and now watching and enjoying the play offs.

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I’m interested in starlink, especially if or when it’s available to take with you, like if we’re taking the camper somewhere 

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Dude that's crazy I didn't have to pay to get cable bored to my house from the end of my driveway and it's like half a mile. At the time it was Verizon now frontier. 

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We're Uverse and Directv as well.  I've kept the price down by calling and complaining every year when they raise the rates (end of promotions) but with the yearly price increases it's still gotten up there. 

 

Only have one cable option here, local company, and they're $$$.  That said, we're considering dumping directv and moving to streaming.  If we go that route we'll probably ditch this crappy uverse and go to cable internet with the local company.

 

The problem with streaming over the web is, the same companies who own the cable and dish services also provide our internet.  They aren't going to let their revenue drop, so they'll make streaming efficiently require an expensive internet package.

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We cut cable 2 years ago. Just wasn't worth the money for us - but I guess it depends on what you like to watch.  We enjoy 100Mbs to the house (rural town). It's a hyper reliable service as I work from home for a large high tech global company from the middle of nowhere....

 

We now stream everything  - Netflix / Amazon Prime / AppleTV.... and I'm on webex calls presenting to hundreds of people.

 

If you're out of reach from regular internet service providers, Elon Musk launched Starlink a pretty good satellite internet service for remote communities at US$99 month (150mbs down). I think installation is US$499. Currently the service has some downtime - but it should reach 24hrs service with each new batch of satellites launched.

 

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You can stream 4K TV video on three teevees in your house/shop with just 40mbps down, with no buffering. So your Internet connection does not need to be blazing fast for cutting the cord and going all in for streaming.

 

Ya just gotta choose a hardware streaming dongle that provides you with options such as increasing the storage space for apps and the ability to install 3rd party (unofficial) apps, or the ability to install any apps that ya wish. Because your goal with cutting the cord in favor of streaming is to minimize your costs, right? Most of the Android dongles provide for both of those options because they can be unlocked by the user.

 

What I am saying is Streaming TV can provide you with 100s of free IPTV, movies and sports channels without ever spending a nickel on any paid services. And all of the paid services apps are available to you if you want them.

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I'll continue to watch Starlink services...we do a lot of camping (travel trailer) for the wife's rock hound hobby...so we are frequently off-grid and even many times if we are at a formal campground, there might not be decent cell signal. so me working remote from the camper can be a problem.

I don't really care about watching TV or movie content via Sat, I can preload movies on my ipad or still have a large collection of DVDs for late night viewing, but to have reasonable up /down brandwidth for work...that'll be a part of my semi-retirement plans in the next couple years.

I'd like to retired from my office gig as a manager, and just grab gigs as a contractor...be it PM, or Analysis, even some coding is fine.

but to take 6-12 months gigs...remote...and travel cross country for a couple months at a time...we can drive weekends, then setup and enjoy the area, but still put in a day's work.

 

funny story..first time we saw the first dozen links flying over..it was a freak out moment. Many folks have done this... is it military?  is it an alien invasion?!!!   had to laugh at myself for where my mind was going..too many scifi movies fer sure.

but out here in the sticks were frequently enjoy evenings on the back deck sky watching for satellites etc...so the first time we saw 1, then 3, then a dozen perfectly spaced and in line..yeah..it was a moment.

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11 hours ago, Bighanded said:

funny story..first time we saw the first dozen links flying over..it was a freak out moment. Many folks have done this... is it military? 

 

That's too funny. 

Not sure how I feel about seeing an entire grid of satellites in the night sky around the globe - although I have heard they can tilt the satellites to avoid glare 🙂

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Got home just in time for the Spectrum installation tech , he was going to  try  and  pull the Directv Satellite cable thru the under ground pipe while feeding the new co-axle thru behind it , I was like " dude , you never know , I might want to go back to Sat in the future " ---  so he called the line bore crew for a 75ft run to the house , and ran a temp wire to the house so even thing else could be done 

 

Everything went well , but one thing I will mention later on , the reception and quality of TV is night and day , I had no idea it could be so clear , super stoked on TV 

 

 the internet is so fast , it is like instant to change from site to site , games are much better --- he talked my out of using my secondary Netgear Wifi router  for a couple of reasons , first was he ran a new cable next to the living room TV which is central of the house and that got the old directv router  off the kitchen counter top which is  a great thing and the wife loves that , second was he installed the newest , heaviest duty router they have and he said it will handle anything I throw at it and so far so good , he used a meter and said the number was 17 , which I really don't know anything about that value 

 

Now for the bad , the two paired TV set up on the patio, Directv had me with a special adaptor from the main big TV and a HDMI cable  to the smaller TV , either he didn't want to mess with it or like he said he didn't know about a dual set up with sound system like this , so he just plugged the HDMI into the second TV and got it going , he was pressed for time , he had a 2 hour window for my job and had a second job to go to , he spent 4 1/2 hours here , so son in law was over last night and we dug up another HDMI cable and connected the  main TV and using the TV thru WIFI is great , You tube music and apps  work great , have not seen it buffer yet  and the sound is working thru the 8 speaker system , but going thru the cable box ,  it won't hold the channels , they play for about 3-4 second and then drop , then come back for 3-4 seconds and keep repeat that and the sound thru the system is static --- so Spectrum is sending out another tech Thursday to try and  get it right ---  

 

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My new internet service is unreal , pics load in a blink of the eye  , it is a pleasure after coming out the dinosaur age 

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I spent about an hour between online chat and the phone yesterday with ATT.  Our monthly bill for TV and internet went from about $130 to $208.  Our "promotional rate" expired...which it does every year about this time.

 

So I tried "chat", that person said there were no promotions available, sorry.  I said "Ok, cancel it then" and she said "Oh the noes! Call this number and see if they can do anything!"

 

Called number, got a nice lady in Rochester NY who nosed around looking for a discount.  I told her if she could get the bill back to what it was, great, if not, cancel it. 

 

Surprise, surprise, she got the bill back down to where it was...for another year.  Of course, these "promotional credits" don't affect their yearly "Our rates are increasing, sorry!" emails we get EVERY year, so the bill still creeps up, but as long as the $70ish "promotional credit" is there the wife seems to be ok with the bill. 

 

But, for now, bill is back down.  Wife is happy.  She pays the bill and I don't watch TV (other than old cartoons on Boomerang with the little one), so I didn't really care one way or the other.

 

If you call for a discount, you have to be willing and ready to cut them off.  If you waver, they'll gouge you.

 

Our internet still sucks.  Looks like "up to 18MBPS" is the best available internet speed through ATT available in my area, which is what we have.  We usually get about 11-12 right next to the modom, which is fine for most use.

 

Our wifi is terrible.  Old house, plaster walls, and lots of rooms (vs an "open floorplan") so the wifi signal is just bad.  I have an ancient apple airport with a couple of repeater thingys, but they don't work well at all.  I'm sure there are better options out there now.  I need to look into it, without spending a fortune.

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Jeep I just tested my att fixed wireless speed and am posting a pic of the results below. I’ll try and remember to check this evening and do the same when I imagine speeds are slower bc of more people at home. Anyway if you’re a reasonable distance from an att tower you might consider that. 
 

Our plan is 350 gb. We’ve never gone over, even when kids come home for the holidays and whatnot. We cut the cord so all our tv is streaming. 
 

 

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Slowingdown , I see your at 28.6 , I just tested mine 186.2 --- I don't know if it makes a different , have 5 TVs on , 2 computers going and the grand daughter logged into WIFI 

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I book marked that speed tester , just tried it agin 201.4 

 

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