Goodbye Comcast

Comcast has been a miserable company to deal with from the start. Regular price increases, decreasing services, bad technicians (when they actually show up) and the worst customer service I've ever experienced.

Ever since the digital switchover last year they have been systematically removing the TV channels from our line-up in an effort to force us to go with their "digital" packages. Their digital packages require a Comcast addressable box to use with each TV that you have. In our case 6 of them and of course they charge a monthly fee for each of them. They really want you to go with the digital package as they can then sell you down-loadable movies and such. A big money maker for them. NO THANKS I kept telling them. It got so bad earlier this year that I decided to downgrade to their lowest level of service since I was not receiving that many TV stations anyway and was being charged well over $100 month for TV + Internet service. Our monthly bill was reduced to around $48. At first with their lowest tier TV service we were actually receiving more stations than before! That did not last long, maybe 6 months as they began switching those extra channels to their digital only service. Well OK I said, I'm not paying for those extra ones anyway. We were basically receiving only the local analog and digital channels, the weather channel and a few paid advertising channels as of 3 weeks ago.
Well about 2 weeks ago they started to remove the local digital channels from my line-up. In our case that was digital 2.1 (CBS), 11.1 (NBC) & 11.2 (RTV ). That left us with the analog feed of our local CBS & NBC affiliate which on an HD TV is barely watchable. Now remember, when the FCC made all the TV stations switch from analog to Digital a couple of years ago the cable companies were required to carry the digital local feeds even on their lowest tier service. Apparently a recent change in the law made them only liable to carry analog signals which Comcast is bent on carrying out.


About a 1 1/2 weeks ago after I noticed a few of our digital local channels missing I started a chat with Comcast via the internet with the intent of asking them why they removed those channels even as they are continually raising prices. After chatting with 3 different reps and being disconnected repeatedly from their chat service (literally dozens of times) over more than an hour and them trying to up-sell me to their digital service, the last one discontinued the chat with no warning. Not only that but less than 2 minutes later my internet connection went down. Apparently the little bastard pulled the plug on my internet service. All the while my son Sean was also logged into my laptop watching the chat and could not believe these imbeciles were not even answering my questions.
Sean commented on Twitter...

"Comcast is really terrible tonight, they are spending hours chatting with my dad about wpxi 11.1 and 11.2 disappearing from their lineup and now their comcast internet went down... WTF Comcast????"

I'm glad he was watching as I don't think anyone would have believed their ineptness.

I had to call them on the phone and get them to re-connect my internet service. Another 45 minutes down the drain with a fellow from India.

That was the last straw. After putting up with their crappy compressed Digital TV signals that they were taking away anyway and them supplying even worse analog TV signals  I knew it was time to dump them.

But who to go with?

Being an amateur  radio operator I knew that the Over The Air broadcast signals that the local stations put out are the very best quality you can get. After all, companies like Comcast receive those same OTA signals, compress them, stuff them into their cables and sell them to suckers like us.

Time to get a good antenna!

After thoroughly researching TV antennas, I came across Dennys Antenna Service in Michigan and really liked his small EZ-HD Antenna and decided to buy it and install it in my attic. 

Denny has a lot of good info and links on his site on how to choose the best antennas and equipment.

I bought the EZ-HD last Sunday and it came on Wednesday. Today I installed it in the attic and I am now enjoying the best Digital TV quality that I have ever seen and I get more channels than I was getting from Comcast! And it's FREE

http://www.dennysantennaservice.com/ez_hd_tv_Antenna.html

These 3 things also are a contributing factor in my decision to drop cable.
1. A lot of TV programming is available on-line and it's pretty easy to connect a laptop to our HD TV    and watch it on the "big screen".
2. We subscribe to Netflix and watch a lot of movies delivered to our mailbox.
3. Sean bought an Apple TV a few weeks ago and has been bringing it over on the weekends. A lot of programming is available through Apple TV including movies via our Netflix account.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_TV

Next I need to dump our Comcast internet service which by the way I never really had many problems with. A few bad modems along the way and waiting way too long for their techs to come out but that is about all.

Sean recommended DSL Extreme which looks good and is faster and cheaper than what I have with Comcast. I'm also looking into Verizon DSL but eventually I would like to drop our land-line also so the DSL Extreme running on a dry loop may be the way to go.

http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4587166_dry-loop-dsl-work.html

Stay tuned....