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Post by sneakers (Metro Houston) on May 1, 2018 16:41:31 GMT -5
The unused satellite dishes are now gone from my roof. We had roof damage to a detached garage thanks to general deterioration and Harvey, and we went ahead and did the house when we got the insurance check. Now, we've got a nice buried piece of coax bringing in our video that doesn't go out when it rains. When we got the roof done, the roofing contractor said "we don't re-aim satellite dishes." I told them to get rid of them because they are unused. My house caretaker was happy that we don't have a satellite dish on the roof for the wind to catch and cause roof damage.
I need to call Comcast Customer Care because they have an old account in their system for me. Their system won't let you enter your cell phone number or E-mail address as contact points for an account if it's on file for another account!
AT&T tries their darndest to try to get me to come back, but I'm quite happy with Comcast's Xfinity Internet and their Xfinity Instant TV (their version of streaming, the cable modem takes a signal out of the cable TV pipe and converts it to a Wi-Fi signal). We did 708 GB of broadband data transfer in April. We have a monthly cap of 1024 GB, but we're allowed to go over twice a year without excess bandwidth charges.
In March, we used 933 GB and I was on vacation for a long week and on a hotel's Wi-Fi (which was also very good, it was Comcast Business service). And that was with backing up both a laptop with 1 TB storage and a 4 TB external backup storage drive. I've got 1.5 TB of data on a cloud backup plan.
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Post by lightbulb1 on May 4, 2018 10:52:39 GMT -5
we lost 10-12 channels the other day and they said it was a computer clitch and offered no rebates cause of this...
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Post by sneakers (Metro Houston) on May 6, 2018 12:04:06 GMT -5
Saturday's mail brought me another offer to sign up with DirecTV. Every one of them offers increasing rebates. But I'm too happy with Comcast lately. Their early-on glitching with Xfinity Instant TV seems to have been resolved. I had something on the TV all day last week and could go from channel to channel without error messages popping up.
The only comment that I have is they put "News" and "Sports" in the same channel pack. Although it seems, with some of Houston's teams in the playoffs, I've been watching them play.
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Post by markjames on May 9, 2018 9:33:10 GMT -5
I had yet another tenant that ordered expensive, problematic and data capped satellite broadband since Frontier told them DSL wasn't available at their location.
All other tenants in building have Frontier 25 Mbps DSL and they're currently offering this tier @ $35 per month with either a free year of Amazon Prime, or a $100 Amazon Gift Card with 2 year agreement.
I called to set up their installation and yet another rep told me DSL wasn't available at this location where we've had DSL availability for years.
Fortunately I was able to speak with someone with half a clue that set up an installation date.
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Post by sneakers (Metro Houston) on May 9, 2018 14:56:56 GMT -5
This morning, I got a survey from Comcast asking what I thought of their services I use. When they asked if I had Xfinity Instant TV, I said that I did. They then asked a lot of questions about my experience with it. I’m the main user of it in the house, the other TV users predominantly either stream other providers or they use their video games.
I told them that its reliability had improved significantly since I first started using it.
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Post by lightbulb1 on May 15, 2018 16:36:35 GMT -5
so far so good...
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Post by sneakers (Metro Houston) on Jun 6, 2018 17:52:20 GMT -5
Got a card in the mail - "We Miss You."
I think it should have been called "We Miss Your Money" and it would have been more accurate.
Although DirecTV wants to give me what I paid $90 for for only $20, I didn't bite.
I don't miss the signal going out every time you want to watch a weather forecast, and I don't miss AT&T's poky DSL for Internet access.
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Post by markjames on Jun 7, 2018 10:29:48 GMT -5
Since my last post I've had several more customers that were incorrectly informed that broadband wasn't available, or that a higher speed of broadband wan't available at their address.
I've been performing a lot of tech work for cord cutting customers, tenants, employees and relatives that have dropped cable and/or satellite in favor of streaming media.
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Post by service66 on Jun 25, 2018 23:39:48 GMT -5
I haven't had pay tv in 18 years. Anything I'd care to watch is online somewhere.
Comcast is fine but I've resorted going to the store here in town to resolve any service issues that may pop. Online help is the worst.
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Post by sneakers (Metro Houston) on Jul 5, 2018 20:08:06 GMT -5
Today's mail brought me two things related to pay TV.
First was the August issue of Consumer Reports Magazine. Back when I was working a lot of overtime, Consumer Reports offered a lifetime subscription for a $1000 donation to their foundation. I took them up on the offer. Other things where I got a lifetime subscription was to the American Association of Individual Investors (compares and contrasts different investment strategies, when I joined I was managing a lot more assets than I am now) and the Association for Computing Machinery (a professional society for hardware and software weenies).
Consumer Reports did a review of various alternate video sources available by subscription. I noticed they did DirecTV NOW (which I had for a couple of months and discontinued) but not Xfinity Instant TV (which I found to be a lot better than DirecTV's streaming product). It's a streaming video product from the cable modem to the TV, but it uses the cable TV physical plant (which you already have in your house if you have Xfinity Internet) to deliver its signal to your residence. There are a number of advantages to the Xfinity product.
Second was another offer for DirecTV. Except this time, they only offered a $200 prepaid card and a $20 a month subscription for a year. I guess AT&T is getting desperate over at Whitacre Tower, but they're slowly giving up. The previous offer was a $300 prepaid card and $20 a month for a year. I happily gave up TV that goes out every time it rains.
For a while, I was in a FEMA evacuation hotel while my house was being gutted and renovated. Got back in it after the walls and floors were done. Their DirecTV receiver had a different message. It said if there isn't a storm outside, you need to contact the front office. Even DirecTV admits their product is unreliable.
The night of the third of July, my grid power was hit by a recloser action (where you have a storm, the power goes away for a few seconds, and it comes back again). Probably the only thing that disturbs Xfinity. But my laptop has integrated mobile broadband (so I can go places that don't have Wi-Fi) and it failed over automatically until the Wi-Fi came back.
Recently, my house caretaker's former girlfriend moved out and took a ROKU TV with her. We have four and a ROKU STB for an old TV that was high enough off the floor that it survived Harvey. The house caretaker's brats disconnected the ROKU STB and only use it for video games. Somebody other than I, who has a TV in what we call the "business room," might want to watch TV. They've got a PlayStation 4, which can do some streaming services. I told her she could get a lot more stuff on the ROKU TV if she had an antenna. She thought the only thing you need an antenna for is the local news. But you can get all the local dot channels too. Lots of stuff on them. But you can't get the dot channels on DirecTV (either traditional or the streaming version). And you can only get about half of the local channels on DirecTV NOW here.
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Post by sneakers (Metro Houston) on Jul 10, 2018 18:05:44 GMT -5
Read the article in CONSUMER REPORTS last night.
They mentioned Xfinity Instant TV, but only in passing. Possibly because you have to have Xfinity Internet to get it.
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Post by sneakers (Metro Houston) on Jul 31, 2018 17:03:09 GMT -5
In the Houston market, Comcast is now advertising the dual play of Xfinity Internet and Xfinity Instant TV as an option that's available. I only found out about Xfinity Instant TV after I got on Xfinity Internet.
Even with Xfinity Instant TV delivering my cable replacement streaming video over a different data path than all other streaming services, we've used 90% of our terabyte monthly cap as of this afternoon. Fortunately, we have less than a dozen hours to go before we get another terabyte of data.
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Post by sneakers (Metro Houston) on Aug 28, 2018 19:40:59 GMT -5
Just checked my data usage for August. Us four data hogs have used 455 GB with three days left to go in the month. Peak usage was in March, 933 GB. Comcast has a 1024 GB monthly cap, but you can go over that two months in the previous twelve without a data use surcharge.
Got not one, but two offers today to sign up again with DirecTV. The one they sent me in the snail mail offered a $200 VISA prepaid card. The one they E-mailed to me offered a $300 VISA prepaid card. I went in and unsubscribed from DirecTV E-mail, one less source of SPAM!
Absolutely no reason that I can see to sign up for DirecTV unless you're an AT&T shareholder that wants to eat their own dog food.
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wb6yyz
Champion Member
Wilkes Barre/Scranton Area
Posts: 5,525
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Post by wb6yyz on Sept 12, 2018 8:53:24 GMT -5
I have Comcast for my Internet and phone. It's for business use, I have 5 static IP addresses. I got fed up with Hostgator when they got bought out, their service was horrible. Looked into other Email providers and they had some of the same faults, so I went from one to 5 IP addresses so I can host my own email server, game server, web server and other stuff myself. No more problems with getting blacklisted because some other yahoo sharing the email server starts spamming people.
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Post by sneakers (Metro Houston) on Sept 15, 2018 1:47:37 GMT -5
Last night during the nine o’lock Hour, both of the Houston stations that have late local news at that hour had technical issues. So, I tuned in one of the other stations ad waited until the ten o’clock hour. At 10:35, one of the affected stations was working again.
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