Improving TV Reception?

[Rothman]

Got internet only here.  Why pay for TV when you can stream anything from the Internet?

[1995hoo]

Verizon tried to sell me on TV when I got my internet but I didn't want to have to go through a separate box, plus why pay when broadcast is free? ....

Yeah, I understand your position. It's why we have the rabbit ears on the two TVs upstairs (master bedroom and guest room) and only have DirecTV on the other two. We just don't watch the two upstairs TVs enough to justify the expense of connecting them to DirecTV. Ms1995hoo also likes having the rabbit ears up here because she can get some channels not available on the satellite, the most notable from her point of view being WETA-UK, the local PBS affiliate's British channel.

BTW, I just went in the other room to see which antenna we have. I knew they are RCA-branded but didn't know the model number. Unfortunately, the model number is not visible on top, and I don't want to pick them up to look on the bottom because I have them positioned just so and if I move them I'll invariably mess up the positioning when I put them back and I will then hear about it because Ms1995hoo will be the one to discover the reception problem! So instead I did a Google search. The RCA ANT121 looks just like what we have and the price ($15) is right about what I paid at Best Buy. Google lists it as also supporting FM reception. I have no idea whether ours do that. Don't much care either. For FM I have a Godar FM 1A antenna hooked up downstairs. Used to use it downtown in an office that otherwise had horrible FM reception and it was great.

[kphoger]

I have DirecTV for the TV portion, with pretty much every channel imaginable. I like sports, wife and mom like movies and the HBO shows, teenager likes what he likes, (etc). So we pretty much have to have it all. I still would have had digital cable, probably, had Suddenlink not taken over the Cox franchise in my area and refused to carry NFL Network and the Speed Channel HD back in the late 2000's. We switched to DirecTV then.

I still am stuck with Suddenlink for my internet, though. There was really no way around it-DSL too expensive and not really all that fast in my area. My internet is very fast, and I have no data limit but I am paying extra to not have that data limit.

I may end up going back to Suddenlink for the cable (bundle) now that HD channel carriage isn't an issue any more, I can probably save a significant amount of money over what I am paying now by having it split between 2 companies.

Out of curiosity (Cox is one of my company's two big parent employers, but we also did work for SuddenLink for a year or two), what is your internet speed?  Cox has always been tough to beat for Internet (serious gamers around here all use Cox), but I know the other providers have been stepping up their game a little bit in the last few years.

[slorydn1]

I have DirecTV for the TV portion, with pretty much every channel imaginable. I like sports, wife and mom like movies and the HBO shows, teenager likes what he likes, (etc). So we pretty much have to have it all. I still would have had digital cable, probably, had Suddenlink not taken over the Cox franchise in my area and refused to carry NFL Network and the Speed Channel HD back in the late 2000's. We switched to DirecTV then.

I still am stuck with Suddenlink for my internet, though. There was really no way around it-DSL too expensive and not really all that fast in my area. My internet is very fast, and I have no data limit but I am paying extra to not have that data limit.

I may end up going back to Suddenlink for the cable (bundle) now that HD channel carriage isn't an issue any more, I can probably save a significant amount of money over what I am paying now by having it split between 2 companies.

Out of curiosity (Cox is one of my company's two big parent employers, but we also did work for SuddenLink for a year or two), what is your internet speed?  Cox has always been tough to beat for Internet (serious gamers around here all use Cox), but I know the other providers have been stepping up their game a little bit in the last few years.

I'm not at home so I don't have the exact numbers with me but the last speed test I ran I was getting in the 100's-110's down and just below 20 up. When I first got cable internet I was coming from dial-up so the jump in speed was absolutely amazing to me, even back when I could only get 5-10 gig download speeds. Now its almost just like changing TV channels going from page to page (or would be if my anti virus and pop up blocker wasn't putting the brakes on everything, lol.

[kphoger]

100-110 is somewhere between Cox's middle tier and the next one up around here.  Which is crazy, because it wasn't that many years ago that DOCSIS 3.0 wasn't even around, and nobody really got anything over 25.  My family is on one of the cheapest tiers, with only 15 Mb/s down, but we use dual-band wifi in order to keep my wife's Chromebook from bogging down.  With nodes in the area having opened up 16 channels, it's now possible to get 200, 300, even 1000–although I'm not sure why anybody really needs that kind of speed at this point.