Your opinions on Cable TV, Internet, Phone providers (Fort Worth, Keller: house, movies)

[jcamber]

Hi all,

I'd be interested in hearing from you on what your current setup is for Cable TV, Internet, Land line, and Cell phone providers, whether you are satisfied with your service and you think the value of these services exceeds the price you pay?

I currently have a package from Verizon that includes FIOS TV (cable), Internet at 15mbs, Land line and one Cell Phone (My wife's). I pay between $205 - 210 a month depending on how many texts my wife sends. I have one HD DVR and two Non-hd boxes. No HBO, No cinemax, you could call bare bones cable to what I have... cell has 450 minutes a month and I use the land line mostly for the security system and faxes.

The amount seems high to me but that's why I'm asking... Thanks!

oh, forgot to mention. I live in Heritage ... the non-proper area of Keller!

[jbb303]

We've had AT&T Uverse for 3 years and I'm pretty happy with it. We are paying about $200 a month for the U300 cable and internet service and land line (cell phones) are separate. We are probably going to ditch the land line soon because we never use it and should save about $40 a month by doing that. The service is very reliable - probably less than half a dozen outages in 3 years, we also noticed some slowdowns with the last big software upgrade to the DVR. We had a few minor issues with installation that were resolved quickly and I had a heck of time getting HBO cancelled at one point (multiple unsuccessful phone calls and I finally resolved it by getting on the customer service chat site). I didn't like the DVR at first because I missed the user friendly DirecTV Tivo, but you can't beat the fact that upgrades to the Uverse equipment have pushed it to the point of being able to use all of the features on any TV in the house.

[Tigerlily64]

Originally Posted by jcamber

Hi all,

I'd be interested in hearing from you on what your current setup is for Cable TV, Internet, Land line, and Cell phone providers, whether you are satisfied with your service and you think the value of these services exceeds the price you pay?

I currently have a package from Verizon that includes FIOS TV (cable), Internet at 15mbs, Land line and one Cell Phone (My wife's). I pay between $205 - 210 a month depending on how many texts my wife sends. I have one HD DVR and two Non-hd boxes. No HBO, No cinemax, you could call bare bones cable to what I have... cell has 450 minutes a month and I use the land line mostly for the security system and faxes.

The amount seems high to me but that's why I'm asking... Thanks!

We have Fios as well, the Extreme HD package (middle option), DVR with an extra set top HD box in the master bedroom so we can watch different programs upstairs and down. The 25mbs internet cos hubby likes to download movies and music regularly, home phone and two smartphones sharing 700 minutes, each with unlimited data plan and 250 texts - the whole lot comes to about $290 (and I get a 17% discount with my company for my cell) - completely outrageous to what we got in the UK (but that is a whole other conversation and I hate to incur the wrath of the good folks in the US we have met for starting another conversation that begins "...in the UK ..." . In fairness the internet connection and download speeds are great and reliable compared to the UK so no complaints on that score. The home phone is something we could do without as we rarely use it but the package comes with it, albeit they charge you $40 just for that part. The whole TV/home/internet/cell packages are very expensive in our opinion, but we chose the options we have so won't complain too loudly!

Originally Posted by jcamber

oh, forgot to mention. I live in Heritage ... the non-proper area of Keller!

love it, you and me both slumming it in non-proper Keller

[hypocore]

On one bill I have Uverse 200 and internet for $123/month including 2 DVR's. Landline is separate bill and is just under $50. Cell phone is prepaid and about $10/month So total about $190.

[Nepenthe]

I have FIOS, I think it's the Xtreme one. I don't get the movie channels or the specialty sports channels but I get everything else. I have one HD DVR (the new 60-hour glossy black box version) and one non-HD non-DVR box (which is actually mostly useless to me since I almost never watch "live" TV and record everything on my multi-room DVR in HD).

I have digital landline with all the online features like call metrics, blocking, etc.

I have 25 mbps download speed internet and a Verizon wireless router.

No wireless / cellphone service (I get it free through my employer).

I pay $165.87 / month or so.

The reliability is awesome, I can't recall the internet ever being down (I remember twelve years ago when I first got DSL that outages were frequent). TV has been down one time.

Performance-wise, the internet access is good. The ping/latency is relatively low (but I've seen lower) and throughput is outstanding both up and down. The phone service is fine.

For the most part, I like the TV service. Here are a few points:
--did not have the SKIP button on OneSource or UVerse (only the FastForward button) and on FIOS it makes bypassing commercials much quicker and less painful
--why are BBC America, G4, and Cartoon Network *still* not available as HD channels?
--the interface is getting long in the tooth, but luckily we're supposed to get an all-new comprehensive software update in the fall or winter which will include a widescreen hi-def menu and guide among other things; it's not clear whether it will less ponderous to wander through the menus though
--picture quality is okay; there's a fair amount of compression artifacts and brief pixelization here and there but sometimes it looks stunning; the software update should finally give us actual 1080p quality
--they handicapped the remote control that they send out now so badly as to make it pretty much useless as a universal remote; the older remotes were true four-function remotes (FIOS,TV,Blu-ray,receiver) but the new ones are dumbed down to basically control FIOS only, but luckily a good universal is under $20 at Amazon, and you're likely going to need it

[jbb303]

The Uverse remote has a skip button directly beneath the "pause" button. It skips 30 or 45 seconds going forward or 7 or so seconds going backward. I rarely use it, so I'm not sure of the exact specs.

[expatChicagoan]

Originally Posted by Tigerlily64

love it, you and me both slumming it in non-proper Keller

Another one slumming it on this side of the tracks...

I pay about the same for my Verizon Fios, which includes land line, internet and cable, and for that reason, we are thinking of ditching the land line and cable, and just going with the internet at less than 1/2 the cost. We figured we can get by with an antenna mounted in our attic for free network television and a subscription to Hulu. We pay under $10 a month for Netflix streaming, and that seems to satisfy most of our entertainment needs - that an an occasional $1 redbox movie.

[Katie1013]

We have ATT Uverse. We had it for a year, tried to switch to Charter (with disastrous results). Switched back to ATT in under a week.

Before we had Uverse 200 with HBO, home phone with 250 minutes (for the alarm only - we never use it) and internet 12. I can't remember what it's called. Our bill was $190.

After we switched back, there were magically specials we were eligible for. We now have Uverse 300, HBO, Cinemax and showtime, same phone and the 18 speed internet for $165. Some are 3 month promos, others are 6 month.

Charter was terrible. We had internet problems and they told me it would be 4 days before someone could fix it. I work from home and do everything via the internet. Without it, I don't get paid. I called ATT, asked to come back and they were at my house in 20 minutes. We've had issues with ATT with connections, wiring, etc, but the techs have always shown up that day or the next day. I had serious issues with ATT cellular before (an employee stole a returned phone and ATT kept charging me for the line even though it was cancelled. It was eventually up to $800 and I had to get the Nebraska public service commissioner's office to help me take care of it.) I had big reservations about using them, but ATT has been really wonderful here in Fort Worth.

[jcamber]

Thanks all for your suggestions! It sounds like for the most part my setup is very similar to that of everyone here, I wish I could drop the land line but the wife is too paranoid because it's used for the alarm system (for automatic calls to the police and fire depts). I checked the bill and the cell phone charge is about $45 a month which I don't think is too bad but the TV and Internet seem excessive -just for TV alone it goes up to around $82 and that just seems too high considering the channels and what they show is a bunch of garbage.

Thanks again

[jcamber]

Originally Posted by Katie1013

Before we had Uverse 200 with HBO, home phone with 250 minutes (for the alarm only - we never use it) and internet 12. I can't remember what it's called. Our bill was $190.

I'll definitely be checking uverse. Do you have an HD DVR box??