Sick of Comcast (Huntsville, Madison: apartment, new house, living)

[GretelB]

I am sick of paying Comcast a fortune for mediocre basic cable. Has anyone used a different service in the area? Or is there a different service? Not keen only going to satellite...

Maybe we'll just cut it all together and start reading books!

[ghett61]

I would love to have Comcast at my house. My only choice is Mediacom and they are terrible. Comcast is amazing compared to the service Mediacom gives.

[Charles]

I find Comcast services (internet, phone, and cable) to work fine here in Huntsville. No cutouts. High throughput. I am not totally happy with their customer service but since I don't have technical problems, I rarely have to deal with them.

I think my triple play is around $120/month: unlimited long distance, 70 or 90 cable channels, and at least 5 mb/s internet throughput. I like plain old analog cable TV too because I don't need to have a box for every TV; I just use split it all over the house. I hated DirecTV because of the reliance on boxes and long refresh times on channel changes.

[phantomplan]

It probably depends where you are, if you still want cable internet. The cable companies are zoned to service a specific area where I live. For example, I was living at an apartment in Madison where only Knology was available. As you can imagine, they felt no need to provide internet at a decent price.

Now at the new house we have, AT&T and Comcast provide service out there. AT&T was by far cheaper, offering a basic local landline for $17.50 and their highest speed 6 Mb DSL for $24.95 (for one year). I ended up going this route and doing Dish Network for tv, and my cost is significantly cheaper than if I were to have tried to bundle it all with Comcast. Not that it's for everyone, but it fit my needs perfectly.

If you're looking to really cut cost (and you don't stream a lot of video, play games online, etc.), AT&T offers DSL Lite for $20/mo. with no commitment and no local phone. But I needed faster than that.

Whatever you do, don't go satellite internet. It's basically dial-up speeds. And check to see if they'll need to dig a trench for DSL/phone if you decide to go that route. I had assumed the builder was going to do that on our new house...I assumed wrong haha.

[419]

Depending upon where you live, you may be able to get the local channels with just a set top antenna. I live in Madison, and ABC, CBS, PBS and Fox come in perfectly. NBC is a bit sketchy, but my antenna isn't the best.

[Charles]

Originally Posted by 419

Depending upon where you live, you may be able to get the local channels with just a set top antenna. I live in Madison, and ABC, CBS, PBS and Fox come in perfectly. NBC is a bit sketchy, but my antenna isn't the best.

Not only that, but you can get high definition over the air.

This is a fantastic tool for checking out your TV reception.

TV Fool


Even better are the KMZs you can open with Google Earth to see exactly what your signal strength would be factoring in distance and reception "shadows" due to topography:


TV Fool (You will need a torrent download program like u-torrent or bittorrent)

http://www.tvfool.com/kmz/torrent/Hu...AL.kmz.torrent

http://www.tvfool.com/kmz/torrent/pe...AL.kmz.torrent


µTorrent - a (very) tiny BitTorrent client

[Southlander]

Don't ya'll have Knology? I've heard more good things than bad about them.

[nalabama]

Yes, we have the Knology bundle--$144/mo. for unlimited local & Long distance phone, one HD box, one SD box for Enhanced Digital, and cable Broadband that is certainly adequate for the limited amount of internet activity we engage in. It's been a year since they draped the cable across the yard for the internet hookup and no sign that they will ever return to bury it. Continued to charge us for months for the Starz packages that we asked them to cancel and it took two calls to get that resolved. The HD box has to warm up before it will accept the remote's input and is very slow on channel changes--and this is the second or third box they have brought out. Knology apparently makes little effort to modulate audio volume between channels or on the local ads that they paste over the national feeds that they are receiving. Especially annoying are the rasping lacks that accompany the cutoff of those local ads. We're shopping.

[DanInHSV]

Funny the OP started a thread on this one. I just turned in my box to Comcast today. I was paying $125 / month for basic HD and internet. No complaints on the service other than it's expensive for hardly watching it.

Now, I get all the OTA HD channels from my place in Madison with an indoor antenna and got 6.0 Mbps DSL with AT&T. I figure I'll be saving around $1,000 a year. . Also may look into setting up a HTPC next to the TV and watch streaming video from hulu.

[Yoo Shin]

Would you try a dish? I've had DirecTV for 3 years now and it's been nearly flawless. Very few interruptions, even with the weather Saturday we had maybe a glitch or two for only seconds. The ATT DSL that get along with it is decent, but wouldn't be for the PC gaming that I used to do but don't anymore, but works great for streaming video online.

The HD content is vast and the quality is decent but I'll admit it was better with the Time Warner cable I had back in Houston. The tech service is only ok. I've had some issues having a DVR replaced under a service agreement that took a letter to the VP to get taken care of, BUT that's another story..