Technology Viewer

So I have been threatening it for a while now, but last Wednesday I finally did the deed….

I walked into Time Warner Cable, handed them my set top box/DVR and told them to drop Cable TV, and Digital Phone from my service. We are keeping Road Runner internet from them, for now.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

The first major complaint was something a bit unexpected. Apparently everyone in the house used the clock on the Time Warner DVR as their main way to tell time. So for a few days now we have all lost track of time in the living room. A minor and somewhat humorous annoyance at best.

For a person that grew up on over the air TV and then cable TV. Having no live TV is a bit unsettling. We so rarely watched anything live with the DVR anyway, that’s its not really a problem, but, all the same, knowing it’s not there now is somewhat disconcerting.

As far as TV entertainment we have Netflix hooked up to our Xbox 360, and the streaming service is so good, that we have plenty of TV and movies to watch, but while I wait for Amazon to ship my over the air DTV to HD converter box (that’s another story in itself) we are currently without any sort of live TV. That wasn’t a problem until I had some time to kill on Sunday and wanted to put on the NFL playoff games on in the background.

On the upside, cutting the Cable TV and Time Warner Digital Phone from my service has actually managed to increase my bandwidth. I know it’s the oddest thing, but I was getting 320k upload and between 4m and 6m download speed. Now that the Phone and TV is off the line, we are getting 256k to 320k upload (I think it’s supposed to drop to 256k but it hasn’t been a permanent change yet). But our download speed has nearly doubled. We are getting 10m to 12m download now, which is crazy. I suspected that the digital phone service had some dedicated bandwidth tied to it, but I had no idea it was soaking up 4m to 6m of available service.

The downside is that I am having a harder time than ever holding an Xbox Live connection. The cable line coming to our house may have some damage on it, but 99% of the time it worked just fine until the change. We’d get a router reset once every other day or so that I suspect was related to that “damage” but nothing that I wanted to call TW’s crappy customer service about. But now… now sometimes it’s fine, but sometimes I can’t hold an Xbox live connection (and thus stream netflix) for more than a minute. With all the politicking and threat of caps and billing by useage that Time Warner has threatened I am wondering if Time Warner is interrupting the $8.99 netflix service on purpose.

We have no proof, but all the same we are having Frontier DSL hooked up this week. If the speed is adequate and the connection holds I think we will be done with Time Warner for good. Besides Frontier will let us have a very basic telephone service, which as modern as we are, we realized that with a child in the house having an emergency phone service available to her and her sitters or grandparents might be a good idea.

So that’s where we are right now. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to talk about our over the air HD digital TV receiver, and perhaps even a new internet service.

…