Getting Unplugged

[spuwho]

After some time talking about it, we finally went "unplugged" from cable TV.

Now use Roku with SlingTV for non-broadcast TV.

Use Tablo to watch and record OTA over my wireless.

Kept Comcast for bulk broadband but raised the speed. While its marketed at 100Mbps, I see about 88-92Mbps.

I looked at all sorts of ways to lose the cable. There is alot of junk floating around I found. I also worked with Kodi, the media center software for Linux. Also tried OpenElec, the Linux just for media. While any techie can deal with it, its way too futzy for a family household.

I can watch the OTA TV with any device now with the Tablo, iPhone, iPad, Android, Roku, doesnt matter, even when I am not home.

The SlingTV deal only allows one device at a time which can be a limitation, but we haven't run into any problems yet.

We kept Netflix. Dropped Hulu due to the number of commercials. We still have some months of Amazon Prime to burn off, but we found it pretty disappointing.

Another discovery in the effort is the limitations of many consumer routers. While the WAN port is advertised at 1Gbe, its the WAN to LAN performance that makes the difference when you up your speeds with Comcast. My router could only pass 15Gb it turns out, which was an easy fix.

The other discovery is that for Comcast to support yet higher speeds, they are starting to obsolete certain cable modems, ones you wouldnt expect. Mine was a Docsis 3.0, but only support 4x4 channels. To get the new speed levels I had to replace the modem (I own, not rent) and got a 16x4.

As it stands I reduced my cable bill by 66%. I added some streaming services to offset, but I still save more than 50%.

I picked up some hardware, but that will be paid back by the end of the year.

[Jason]

Nice work!  I've been contemplating a similar setup, however, I'm not quite sure I'm ready to give up access to the few cable channels I watch regularly (i.e. AMC, Discovery, Nat Geo, TLC, Animal Planet, FOOTBALL, etc.). 

I know there is plenty of educational programming available thru Netflix (which I also have), but I still think I will have a hard time convincing the wife to ditch cable.  We've also found that there doesn't seem to be a substantial price drop for us if we were to eliminate the cable tv because we have the "bundle" (includes voice and internet)....  Comcast says we would only save about $10 a month if we dropped cable tv...

[Josh]

If you're just streaming, your ISP speed tier is way overkill. Sling TV maxes out at ~4.5Mbps for their highest quality channels, with many at an even lower bitrate. Netflix maxes out around 6Mbps, unless you're streaming 4k from them which they claim requires a 25Mbps connection. Even with several devices streaming from different services at once you're still only going to be using a fraction of your available bandwidth.

It doesn't really matter since I have that same package from Comcast, and even after my 2-year "introductory" period ended it's only gone up to $62/month. Next time they bump the price up I'll call their retention line and get it lowered back to $45/month for another 2 years

[spuwho]

If you're just streaming, your ISP speed tier is way overkill. Sling TV maxes out at ~4.5Mbps for their highest quality channels, with many at an even lower bitrate. Netflix maxes out around 6Mbps, unless you're streaming 4k from them which they claim requires a 25Mbps connection. Even with several devices streaming from different services at once you're still only going to be using a fraction of your available bandwidth.

It doesn't really matter since I have that same package from Comcast, and even after my 2-year "introductory" period ended it's only gone up to $62/month. Next time they bump the price up I'll call their retention line and get it lowered back to $45/month for another 2 years

I do more than just streaming.

After my initial oversight on the router WAN to LAN bandwidth limitation, I hooked up a monitor to see what the usage is post unplug.

At the moment the max I am seeing for just streaming is 1.5Mbps.

The service I have today is Xfinity Boost which is 49/mo.

I didnt mention that I have other activities that are internet based that I perform on the same link. 

A home office phone that uses SIP.
My cell switches to SIP when I am at the house.
Work VPN
I perform remote access to several locations abroad including some cloud providers
I also freelance, so I could have anywhere from 5 to 25 devices active at the same time from Raspberry Pi's to multi-Xeons.

While I dont use Torrents all that much, without QOS, I have see a single torrent bring a SIP call to its knees.

I also download a lot of ISO's for testing in my lab, so beyond the number of Windows and Debian updates, I do keep the link busy.

I will admit I was pretty stunned when I saw Google Play push an update to one my tablets at 42Mbps. Its a rooted Gen 1 tablet, I didnt think that Tegra could handle that much IO.

But after a month or two of analysis, I will get a good picture of what my total utilization is.

FWIW: Since I went to Boost, my ping quality has improved by a factor of 2. But my internet monitor is noticing that the Comcast backbone gets really busy between 7PM - 11PM ET.  Clearly the increasing number of streamers is showing up.

Comcast is still routing Jax traffic through Miami then back up to Atlanta before dumping it off at a NAP. This probably means they have a fiber that runs down US1 or the FEC ROW. They really need to drop a fiber link between Jax and ATL to pull all the traffic off that Miami routing. But I digress.