Talk to me about your home internet provider

[DowningRules]

I'm getting Harry Reem'd by AT&T as my home internet provider.  I have about the lowest speed and it costs me something like $40 per month which is (doing the math in my head) nearly $500/year.  And this is for DSL. 

 

I want to get the price down without too many headaches when/if switching over.  I'm not tech enough to understand everything on dslreports.com, but I would be interested to know what anyone else does to save money.

 

Looking for minimal price with minimal hardware purchase and minimal installation headaches.

 

Merci.

 

[nate]

40 is fairly low for internet these days.

 

I pay 40ish for 10/1 through Time Warner.  I wouldn't recommend it, their customer service is as awful as the actual service.

[gotbeer]

I hear you downing.  In the same boat.  LA isn't important enough I guess to get fiber.  You would have to check around to see what cable company services your area.  I think if you can't get high speed internet through AT&T, Verizon's service is also unavailable.  

 

Best bet may be to call AT&T up, and say the speeds are too slow for you.  They will run checks to see if they can upgrade your lines.  More than likely they will say they can't, and just tell them you need better speeds, so will be looking into Cable.  They will give you the number to a retention specialist.  For what your dsl speed is, it's about $14.99-19.99 on Cable.  They will probably match it.  

[GuliblGuy]

I have AT&T...they have a year introductory rate of like $19.99 or something...what I do is cancel my internet, then re-sign up, it's only that cheap if you sign up online I think...then just cancel and do it again every year.

[Jay]

I have the AT&T DSL also and it's about $40.  It's not bad.  Nowhere near as fast as FIOS but I don't have that option in my neighborhood.  I should probably dump my land line and the DSL in favor of Roadrunner internet but I've always hated Time Warner.

[Count Orlok]

Verizon has great speeds but they've been having more outages lately. For a few years the connection never crapped out at all. The last few months it's happened maybe 3 or 4 times. Still better than Time Warner which would die out completely every couple of days. The best option would be to move to Kansas City and get Google Fiber but then you'd have to live in Kansas City.

[Vegas Halo Fan]

I have Cox Cable. For the most part it's reliable. When I do have a problem I'm usually on my own unless I get to the third level in tech support. The front line people always want you to unplug/reboot everything, which I have already done before I called them. If you have a wireless router, they want to blame every problem on it. Once they told me that my cable modem was shot and needed replacement. After I bought another one at their suggestion I found out that there was a service outage in my neighborhood. Fortunately the store where I bought the modem was good about taking it back.

 

My service is about $58 per month, so good luck staying at $40 and improving your service.

[mrwicked]

comcast teleworker - its business class interwebs.

i get 60 mbps download and 25 mbps upload via speedtest (about 20x what i was getting with ATT's top of the line uverse setup).

its insane.

[RallyMo]

We have Time Warner.

 

I just ran a speed test and it seems we're getting around 18/2 and pay around $45 a month. We don't have any TV service and stream everything, which works out fine since all my teams are out of market.

[Brandon]

I'm in DR's boat and looking for options. I had a tv and internet bundle and was paying about $100-110 for the second from the top internet tier and just about every channel but Spice and Nickelodeon. I was on auto pay and never checked the bills and started seeing $176 bill processings....seems pretty excessive.

The internet portion was $50.

DR can do what I did and mention cancelling. They sent me to a cancel person who offered everything at the $100 rate but I was kind of pissed at the bump....I used to sell Directv and it's probably karma.

I'm looking to do what Rally does since we have Netflix, Hulu Plus, and stream everything else. I'm looking for a better option as well. I didn't mind ATT, but feel like there may be better options.

PS. I also did the connection test/complain and they bumped me up to the next tier for free.

[RallyMo]

B, the only issue for you is that unless you moved, when it comes to sports you're probably kind SOL.

[Brandon]

Really? I haven't tried but have seen the links for local games on Front Row Sports and others. But I found I was watching most local games with buddies at the pub anyway.

I started to really love the streaming stuff. I don't watch much TV outside of sports but love being able to just hammer out 3-4 episodes in a row of a show with no commercials. I'm sure I'll jump into the new age here soon and hook it up to the tv for viewing.

[RallyMo]

Really? I haven't tried but have seen the links for local games on Front Row Sports and others. But I found I was watching most local games with buddies at the pub anyway.

I started to really love the streaming stuff. I don't watch much TV outside of sports but love being able to just hammer out 3-4 episodes in a row of a show with no commercials. I'm sure I'll jump into the new age here soon and hook it up to the tv for viewing.

 

Well, yeah. I haven't tried anything like Front Row so I don't know. You should definitely try them out for a week or so before making any switch to see if it works for you but if you're catching most stuff while out that's not that big of a deal for you as it would be for me. The appeal of the pay subs for sports is the ease of use for me. I don't have to find links or anything, just about every provider has an xbox app and they all have mobile apps.

 

Netflix, Hulu+ and great for TV watching. It's been at least three years since I've actually watched anything live on TV in terms of series. 

 

I read that HBO is possibly coming around to making HBOGo available on a subscription basis, which is fantastic. 

[Brandon]

That would be great. I haven't tried the Hulu+ at the gf's house, but with Netflix my only complaint is the lack of quality movies, but mainly no premium TV series like HBO. That would be really cool. I know they have an apparently for HBO Go on her Roku player.

[Count Orlok]

That would be great. I haven't tried the Hulu+ at the gf's house, but with Netflix my only complaint is the lack of quality movies, but mainly no premium TV series like HBO. That would be really cool. I know they have an apparently for HBO Go on her Roku player.

Isn't the only way to get HBO Go by having an HBO Subscription on top of your regular cable subscription? As far as I know you can't get it as a standalone product.

[DowningRules]

Brandon, et al:  I forgot about the whole threatening to cancel routine.  Thanks for the reminder.  My wife took care of that stuff and she was expert at it.  I swear she had an internal clock for it and knew when it was about the right time to call.  She did it with Directv and AT&T about every 5-6 months.  I need to pick up that slack.

 

The way I'm looking at these bills these days is to figure out how much it costs me in a 12 month period.  The results are not fun.  But it makes you get on top of it as best as one can.  Internet:  $480/year.  Directv:  about $1000/year.  So, that's $1500 that would look pretty tasty if I threw that amount in a savings account over 10-20 years. 

 

And if it weren't for Angel games, I'd probably bail on satellite/cable all together.  It's just to easy to watch Breaking Bad or whatever by other means.  And I'm not in a big enough rush where I need to see it first run.

[Brandon]

Isn't the only way to get HBO Go by having an HBO Subscription on top of your regular cable subscription? As far as I know you can't get it as a standalone product.

As of now yes. I got the impression from his post that HBO is tinkering with having it be a stand alone.

[DowningRules]

Regarding HBO Go to non-subscribers:

 

 

http://www.deadline.com/2013/03/hbo-go-considered-for-non-cable-subscribers-report/

[mrwicked]

Brandon, et al:  I forgot about the whole threatening to cancel routine.  Thanks for the reminder.  My wife took care of that stuff and she was expert at it.  I swear she had an internal clock for it and knew when it was about the right time to call.  She did it with Directv and AT&T about every 5-6 months.  I need to pick up that slack.

 

The way I'm looking at these bills these days is to figure out how much it costs me in a 12 month period.  The results are not fun.  But it makes you get on top of it as best as one can.  Internet:  $480/year.  Directv:  about $1000/year.  So, that's $1500 that would look pretty tasty if I threw that amount in a savings account over 10-20 years. 

 

And if it weren't for Angel games, I'd probably bail on satellite/cable all together.  It's just to easy to watch Breaking Bad or whatever by other means.  And I'm not in a big enough rush where I need to see it first run.

 

just get MLB.tv - that's how i watch angels game. its great.

 

and yeah HBO is considering bundling it with ISPs along with (or instead of) cable packages.

but they've got such a ridiculous setup now with cable (they pay basically nothing for marketing since cable companies force it upon you and most people dont cancel); the numbers will have to work. they can't risk pissing off cable companies completely because they wont be able to match the revenue from cord-cuters only.