Cord cutting
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@george-k said in Cord cutting:
F'ing Comcast...
My "promotional rate" has expired, and so my cable/internet bill is going up about $35 a month. It's been pretty reliable, but not worth the money that I'm paying.
Mrs. George and I have decided to cut the cord and go streaming.
T-mobile has a 5G internet plan - unlimited data, about 100 Mbps speed. They provide the gateway (modem/router).
No contract. Guaranteed price.
$50 a month.
The speed is about ½ of what I'm getting now, but it's still much more than I need.
We'll keep CrapCast for a month and see how we do without. If happy, AMF...
We’ve been fine with it, just make sure they don’t have any Data Caps where they slow it down after a certain point.
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For reference a 4K stream from netflix is about 7Gb per hour.
In order to hit a monthly 1Tb data cap (1000Gb) you'd need to watch 4K content for 5 hours a day, 30 days in the month.
Regular HD is about 3Gb per hour. So over 10 hours of streaming a day.
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@copper said in Cord cutting:
T-Mobile 5g advertising is about 100 Mbps
How do you get 490 Mbps?
Just guessing - George may be lucky.
Much harder to estimate what any individual customer may get similar to a wired connection - they probably advertise a floor rather than a ceiling for a wireless connection.
Signal strength drops off exponentially with distance from the source - so guessing George lives close to a tower.
It may make sense for them to limit the speed in the future if their backhaul gets saturated.
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@xenon frankly, I'm very surprised.
When I got the email, I had to check my address to see if my home qualifies. I think being on the 2nd floor helps. D2 in Wisconsin doesn't qualify, but D3, about 2 miles from here does.
When the sales person called to explain things he told me that they are limiting subscribers as to prevent network overload during peak times. Testing it a few times shows a fair amount of variability (as low as 200 - which is still higher than I got with cable). At the moment, it's 239...
The big thing is the cost - $50 for unlimited data. Even if they throttle it down, it'll be OK except for those times when I really need that super high-definition German pr0n.
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And let's be honest - you always need super high def pron.
Think about how variable your cell signal is from place to place. But, there they can advertise "up to _Mbps" because "you're just in the wrong spot if you're not getting it"
With this - the receiver is not going to move around. Other people using the service drink out of the same bandwidth. Lots of variables, so they have to be conservative with the advertised speed.
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@xenon said in Cord cutting:
the receiver is not going to move around.
Exactly. It has a "on-the-battery" mode. So you can move it around the house to find the bestest signal. Though I'm only getting 2-3 bars (out of 5), my connection is good enough that I'm hesitant to move it.
Because better is always the enemy of good.
they can advertise "up to _Mbps"
Yes. When we were in the Cheddarshack with DSL, we were getting about 12-15 which was, at least in the early 2010s, good enough for Netflix, etc.
But not enough for the German pr0n, of course. I had to settle for the American stuff... -
Very, very weird.
This morning, I was getting speeds of only about 25 Mbps or so. Not really noticeable with casual web browsing, but I tried some of that aforementioned "German stuff," and it was really poor.
Seems that the speed is very dependent on the placement of the gateway. Some people say that if you put it in a window with a screen, it's worse. Some say that it tends to get hot (no fan, only heatsink), and that affects performance.
Yet, this evening, having done nothing different, here are the results from a minute ago:
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Just got Fioptics installed with Cincinnati Bell. Getting about 100-150 mbps download but the upload speed is nearly as fast. With Spectrum it was about 10-20% f download speed.
The nice thing is all our TV is now wireless. We have boxes, but no cable other than the internet entering the house. This is a very good thing because our cable configuration was a real Frankenstein construction. We had internet coming in one place, TV coming in on a cable that ran all the way around the back of the house and then with repeaters and splitters and stuff that had to be kept plugged in in the basement or all TV would not work. What a mess.
So far it is running flawlessly with two TVs streaming, two laptops running, two iPhones connected and two iPads.
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I continue to be happy with T-Mobile's service.
I had a period on Saturday evening when speed dropped to about 14-15 download. Certainly slow, but fast enough for streaming some live TV and casual web surfing. Of course the aforementioned German stuff was out of the question.
I got on their forum and asked about variable speeds, and the general consensus is that placement of the tower is fussy. Moving it as little as two feet can make a huge difference in speed, as can other factors. I moved my tower one foot to the right, and rotated it 90 degrees. Since doing that, I'm consistently faster than 300 Mbps. Usually faster than 400 Mbps.
I called
ComcastXfinity yesterday to downgrade my internet speed to the lowest tier possible (50 Mbps), saving about $30 a month. I'll probably keep our TV package because Mrs. George likes to surf, and that's difficult when you're streaming from individual apps.
When I told them I was going to downgrade, the very pleasant lady wondered if it would be fast enough for my needs. I told her about T-Mobile and the price and she was shocked. Then she tried to sell me Xfinity mobile (cell service). I told her I'm getting 10Gigs/month for $20. She said they couldn't match that, and wanted to know my cell provider, LOL. -
Last weekend I had fiber installed. AT&T cold-called me Wednesday, made the offer to upgrade my house, and set the appointment up for Friday. I have a new hole in my house now where the fiber comes in, and my speeds are 300 mbps reliably. That's the lowest tier they offer, for $50/month. It's plenty.
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“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ~Winston S. Churchill
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