Rural Cable and Internet

[Midniteoyl]

Cable.. do NOT go Direct TV or Hughs Net. Terrible. If you cannot get cable, next best is Dish with ATT DSL. I have Dish (love it) with CenturyLink DSL (not so much). As soon as cable is available, I'll switch.

 

[TripleR]

It seems we all have mixed experiences. I have had really good service with Hughes.net and Dish, better than the poor service I got from Charter. I had Charter about ten years ago, so they may be great now, if working properly it was great.

I lose service in heavy rain, so there is a downside. It's kind of a moot point for me though as nothing else beyond satellite is availabe where I live anyway, Charter pulled out years ago.

 

[dmccarty]

We got rid of Directv at the end of last year. Should have done it years ago and saved a small fortune in money. We now stream what little TV we watch from Netflix, Amazon Prime, and YouTube. No complaints with Directv except that the cost was too much for the scat on their channels which is why we canceled. We would have canceled cable for the same reason.

Internet service. <sigh> Well, for us, it stinks. We have CenturyLink DSL and I have learned recently that they are literally out of capacity in our area. They also are having bandwidth issues which we have noticed. We are danged lucky to get 1.5 mbps down even though house near us that get service from a different box get 10mbps. <sigh> We have not had bad experience with actual service calls/visits with Century but the Internet service stinks. Constant modem resets. By the end of the month some upgrades will be done so it will be interesting to see if service improves.

Satellite service is problematic for Internet service due to bandwidth limits and latency.

We only have one Internet service provider and we have tried to get cable to come down our road but they will not even though many people in the neighborhood said they would sign up. We have had good and bad experiences with cable when living in the city. I would go with which ever service is cheapest for the fastest speed for Internet access. The only way you will know about service problems is to ask your neighbors.

What I have been disappointed with is over the air TV. Our Directv was old and only SD so seeing OTA HD was nice. The problem is that the signal breaks up from time to time. We think any breeze messes up the signal. We used to laugh at the cable commercial that would criticize satellite TV for loosing its signal because our cable service dropped the signal far more than Directv ever did. But the over the air signal is just awful.

Later,
Dan

 

[mudcat47537]

I have a set of rabbit ears for TV and verizon for my internet about to go with using the phones to make hot spots. Only other choice I have for internet is dial up and satellite. We seldom watch any TV and haven't for years, even raised the kids without cable.

 

[Larro Darro]

I have Dish at home and cable at work. Both have pros and cons. With Dish you have more channels, including lots of music channels. As I don't watch much regular TV, the music channels are a big plus for me. One of the things I like about cable, if you don't have digital, you can put a splitter on it and record or watch several channels on once. I watch racing, and I record the races at work on two recorders so I can watch it tape delayed. [once in a while I am force to get up and help a customer, so it is good to be able to stop it]
With Dish [or digital cable] you can only watch/record one channel per receiver. Unless you get the new Hopper system. I have heard good things about it, but haven't switched yet. There is still too much old stuff on our DVR.
I take it you can't get DSL from the phone company? If you can, don't pay the going rate until you see if they will lower it. My wife ask them for a break, and we got $10 a month knocked off. Dish does offer internet service, but I have heard mixed reviews about it.
Good luck with the new place.

 

[CliffordK]

I've got DSL.
I think it is a bit overpriced. But...

I should probably look more into going with VOIP, or perhaps dropping the land line.

I read about people in some places with some tremendous speed... downloading 100+MB in a minute or so. But, for now, a couple hundred MB an hour seems fine.

 

[Panik]

Well it's looking like we're going to give Charter a try with bundled service. ATT is only offering 6Mbps download speed and is charging 199.00 installation fee at the moment for Internet and is requiring a service contract. Charter is offering 30Mbps download in our area with a 30.00 installation fee and does not require a service contract. Worst comes to worst we can always change if the service sucks.

We do tend to surf the Internet a lot as well as download movies from Netflix (family of 6) so I am somewhat concerned about the 500Gb monthly cap. But then again with the price difference, and no service contract it'd be foolish not to try Charter before othe services.

 

[CliffordK]

15+ GB a day is a LOT of surfing.

I suppose it all depends on how many movies you are downloading in full HD (legally, of course).

 

[Midniteoyl]

I have Dish at home and cable at work. Both have pros and cons. With Dish you have more channels, including lots of music channels. As I don't watch much regular TV, the music channels are a big plus for me. One of the things I like about cable, if you don't have digital, you can put a splitter on it and record or watch several channels on once. I watch racing, and I record the races at work on two recorders so I can watch it tape delayed. [once in a while I am force to get up and help a customer, so it is good to be able to stop it]
With Dish [or digital cable] you can only watch/record one channel per receiver. Unless you get the new Hopper system. I have heard good things about it, but haven't switched yet. There is still too much old stuff on our DVR.
I take it you can't get DSL from the phone company? If you can, don't pay the going rate until you see if they will lower it. My wife ask them for a break, and we got $10 a month knocked off. Dish does offer internet service, but I have heard mixed reviews about it.
Good luck with the new place.

Not exactly true.. I have the 722k HD DVR and you can record 3 channels and watch a recorded one (or streamed) at the same time.. The 922 is the same with Sling added to watch your DVR over the net. The hopper I believe can record 6 channels and watch 2 at the same time.

 

[Panik]

15+ GB a day is a LOT of surfing.

I suppose it all depends on how many movies you are downloading in full HD (legally, of course).

True 15 GB is a lot - it's more an issue of having issue with being limited in regards to database usage. Internet being the last frontier and all that jazz. Anyways I repented of my evil ways somewhere around the time Limewire went down.