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Cutting the cord – Part 4 – Cellular service

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

I’ve already covered my efforts to cut the cord for internet (Cutting the cord – Part 1 – Internet), TV, and home phone. Next on the list is cellular service. As with the first internet one, this isn’t about eliminating cell service completely, it’s about reviewing your packages and finding ways to get more service for the same price or, more often than not, the same service for less money.

In the cell market in Canada, you have the two biggies — Rogers and Bell. They fight it out, they gouge everyone, the CRTC slaps them, they reset, they duke it out some more. Generally speaking, our cell costs are much higher than anywhere else in the world. According to an OECD report based on comparable 2013 data across 34 countries, we’re the most expensive for data only plans and top ten for data and phone. Not surprisingly, that puts us dead last for number of wireless subscriptions per capita. Is it all infrastructure costs that are driving the difference? Nope — it’s profit margins –> Canadian carriers are third on the list of “revenue per user” in the G8 and fourth across all the countries. We get gouged, no question about it. The CRTC knows this, and has put the screws to the telecom companies on things like extortionary three-year cell packages and transparency in price-gouging, but not much to reduce overall costs.

Cost differentials are left to the secondary tier of cellular companies to drive down costs through competition — Telus, Wind, Koodo, Virgin, Fido, a bunch of others. You might think that was a decent range of competitors. But the branding hides some basic facts.

  • Rogers and Fido are basically the same company, just different branding;
  • Telus and Koodo? The same;
  • Bell and Virgin? The same;

Wind is one of the few that is separate and not simply affiliated with a regional carrier (like SaskTel in Saskatchewan). Which means Fido, Koodo and Virgin are just special plans of the other three big ones (often discount plans for narrow markets). They often too have much more limited variety in packages, phones, data plan options. In the end, you’re often left with a choice of Rogers, Bell or Telus. Back in 2013, Telus and Bell had just under 30% of the cell market each, with Rogers just above 20, and the rest divvying up the remaining 20%. I don’t have the recent data, but I think the other 20% has shrunk to about 15% and the big three have gobbled up some more.

Does it matter which of the three or four you choose? Well, that depends on what you’re doing and where. If you are in a big urban centre, coverage is pretty much the same for all of them. The larger the urban centre, the increased likelihood of small gaps in the city, particularly if you want LTE service on your latest-and-greatest smartphone. If you are doing a lot of data usage (i.e. smartphone internet use), those dead zones could kill you if you’re with the wrong carrier. Most of the dead zones are starting to disappear as networks expand their LTE coverage more uniformly, but could be an issue. Some people also note that it depends on how much you use your phone at home without wifi vs. working in an office building made of signal-blocking concrete, as some carriers work better indoors more based on the distance to the local cell tower than the technology. The technology probably won’t affect you much though for most urban centres.

If you are in a rural area, there can be a huge difference in service. I have a Rogers cellphone, and I get lousy reception in some parts of central Ontario (north of cottage country, like Algonquin Park, Bancroft, even along Highway 7). Out by Luskville in Quebec? Nada. A friend has a Telus SIM card for when he’s roaming in Quebec (including around Luskville) and it works like a charm. Fortunately there are coverage maps that you can search that show which service is best for what area (like a rural community, cottage area, etc.).

Devices? The big three all support the big smartphones like iPhones, some will have slightly different deals for cost over the long-term, etc., but not significant enough to warrant a change against the other factors.

For me, I was with Rogers partly because I offset at one point with my wife’s phone (back when we were dating). She had a Bell phone, so I went Rogers to extend our coverage map (one or the other would work). Eventually, we switched most things to Rogers, she got a smartphone (iPhone 4) and it was just easier to just put her on my account with the new phone. We’ve upgraded a couple of times between us, and my contract was set to expire December 31st of this year. I bought my phone on a 2 year contract, her latest one (in August), we bought straight outright. So after December? No more commitment, just month to month.

Most big networks will let you switch your phones for an unlock fee and SIM-card switch. Sometimes that’s easy, sometimes they give you a big hassle. But since the big three often only offer you much in the way of deals for completely new activations (often limiting you even on transfers), the savings can be more theoretical than real.

I have unlimited text and talk in Canada. I don’t use it, I don’t need it outside Ottawa, really. Except when we travel to Peterborough, mainly so I don’t get hit with a roaming fee. Way under what they offer me for a basic package. Which is why they can offer such a large basic package — many people don’t use it, so it doesn’t cost them that much. Standard voicemail, basic caller ID (numbers, not names), 911 access, blah blah blah. Unlimited video texting too. You pay for international roaming, international calls, and if you exceed your data plan.

I used to have a sweet 6GB data plan. I thought it was awesome. You know how much I actually used? Less than 1 GB per month. I thought my regular usage would climb, but most of the time I’m doing surfing and data munching, I’m on wifi somewhere, not wireless. My wife had a separate 500MB plan on hers. Eventually, we merged them, but my plan was a special offering, so with the merger, I had to give up 6GB and settle for 2. With me less than 1 GB, and her less than 1 GB, seemed like a no brainer. Once in awhile we go over it, often when our phone settings aren’t taking advantage of wifi hotspots enough. But each time I go over, I get a $15 overcharge (used to be $25).

I wanted another GB of data, but wasn’t really looking to go with Bell or Telus right now. We love our current phones, no setup issues, everything works, just not enough data. So, partly inspired by the whole blog writing thing, and the other cutting the cord attempts, I did a minimally invasive tweak to my current package.

I was paying $80 a month for my phone package with 2GB data. My wife was added to my plan and her package was $35. Everything shared. Since my contract was coming to a close, I could pay off the remaining balance ($35 — which was cute since I had a $40 credit sitting on the account after a full credit for this months’ charges anyway), and modify the plan to a simple “Share Everything” month-to-month plan. My plan? Dropped $5. Her plan? Upped $5. Even Steven. Why would I bother? Because they gave me 5GB of shared data. We can go crazy, no more worries about reaching our limit. If we do, our phones REALLY have the wrong settings. Unless I start streaming a lot of music or videos that I’m not doing now, I suppose. I do have a bunch of course videos I want to watch, but most of those will be through wifi, not wireless. Nice to have the option though. Heck, I may even let my son stream a video on Kodi if we’re stuck in a waiting line somewhere. 5GB is more than double what we have now, and we barely exceed 2 now. For the same cost, no commitment, and no overage charges of $15. Oh, and just for fun, they throw in free Shomi, Spotify or NextIssue. I might give Spotify a try.

If I was still bundled with Rogers for everything else, they’d knock 10-15% off that bill. I’m not getting anything “special” with that deal, it’s a good package and a regular price. Still way above what I would pay in Japan or Europe, and marginally above the U.S.

Can you get better deals? Sure.

Telus has a deal for bring-your-own-device, $60 per month, 4GB of data. If you want to add another user, you basically pay for their voice plan. Probably about $100 in total when finished. Or about $20 cheaper than what I’m paying. Bell would likely charge me $90 for the first plan plus thirty for the second, giving me the same price as Rogers i.e. $120. Wind, by contrast, with their smaller market options, different configs and access to the other networks, would be about $40-$45 per phone setup, or about $80-$90 in total. Save about $30-40 for less reliable network. One that has been rumoured to go bankrupt regularly since it started.

So I’m paying a bit more for the Rogers network, partly as it has slightly different coverage than Telus or Bell or Wind, and it costs me a little more. But not as much as yesterday where I would regularly blow my data limit. Instead, same cost, more service. When I need to upgrade my phone or my wife’s phone or maybe add one for my son, I’ll see what deals are available then. For now, I can live with my (newly-tweaked) package.

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Cutting the cord – Part 3 – Home phone

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

As I mentioned in Part 1 (Cutting the cord – Part 1 – Internet), there are five main areas for people looking to “cut the cord”: internet, TV, home phone, cellular phone and website hosting. Of all of them, the one that people are the most bothered by but least likely to do anything about is the home phone.

I grew up with Bell. And I was a long-time victim, err, customer of Bellopoly. I had some perverse pleasure when my wife (then girlfriend) and I moved in together as it meant only paying Bell once between us. One of those cost savings that you actually are gleeful about, in a strange way.

When the CRTC forced Bell to deregulate some of their offerings, other companies popped up to offer home phone service but the prices weren’t that much better and it wasn’t a strong incentive to switch. People relied on their home phone, an essential service you needed to work, and not something you messed with…you paid Bell their monthly extortion, and you grumbled, but you didn’t do anything about it.

Then cell service exploded. Lots and lots of people have ditched their landlines completely, only having cell phones. Mainly the under-30 age bracket, but not exclusively. Just as payphones have followed the dodo out the door, landlines are no longer “must-have” essential services for everyone. Lots of households have multiple cell phones, and with the explosion of smartphones, most of them have them with them everywhere they go. Less chance of leaving your old-style flip phone in the console of your car, or not having it close by.

So when people have “cut the cord”, they have been more likely of late to just cut the landline entirely and go all cellular, all the time. I don’t know that it is a viable solution for us. I am not a huge cell user, honestly. If I have or make 10 calls a month, it’s high. For my wife and I it is mainly about convenience when one of us is out (me) and the other (wife) wants something to be picked up. Or I call from the grocery store and say, “Hey, you put x on the list, did you want 500 ml or a litre?”. Or more often, “You put x on the list…what the **** is x and / or where in the store would I find it?”. I also have a mental blank when I think, “So, whose cell would we put as the number for dealing with our internet, probably me?”. Silly, as it makes no difference whatsoever, but I have some mild comfort from the fact there is a “common” line to reach either Andrea or I, even if we’re not there to answer directly. Also, I like the fact that if my cell phone rings when I’m at work, it’s guaranteed to be worth answering — so few people have it, if it rings, it’s likely my wife or my son’s school. If I start listing it for every business we deal with, I’ll get spam I really don’t want.

As a result, I’ve never really considered cancelling my home phone. I just left it with Bell for a long time, and then when Rogers took over all my other offerings a few years back during a move, I switched to Rogers Home Phone too. Didn’t hurt that I wasn’t sure if the phone lines in our new house were that reliable. They sure looked like cheap wiring. And I never had a problem with the Rogers setup. We have a wireless phone in the house that the base plugs into a jack, and the rest of the extensions connect to the base wirelessly. You only need one jack to work. Because I had Rogers internet, it meant I needed a separate wire setup so that the connection came out of the cable jack, split into phone and computer/internet and then there was the modem, router, computer daisy chain while the other line went back into the wall and wired the phone. All of it worked, no issues.

Well, one issue. The same as with Bell. We don’t use our home phone a lot, and it was running us between $30 and $50 per month over the last few years. I’d tweak the setup once in awhile to get the cost down, but it really was a drag on spending. My mom passed away 3 years ago, and I only call one sibling long distance…very rarely do I make phone calls, most of my comms with people are either in person or by email, facebook or occasional text. My wife uses the phone to talk to the parental units and her sister in town, plus a few other business related things, but her cell would likely work as well. Still we wanted the “common number”. We considered a complete ditch, but weren’t quite ready to pull the trigger.

Enter the VOIP…voice-over-internet-protocol. It’s the fancy way of saying that instead of Rogers Cable or Bell Telephone providing your phone service, you run the connection through the internet. Some think it is just like Skype, but not quite. First, it’s just a phone, no video connector. Second, Skype just runs on your smartphone or tablet or computer, whereas VOIP uses an actual phone for the hardware (usually). Third, there’s a company on the other end, just like Rogers and Bell, handling the connection for you. Not exactly like an “operator”, but close enough. What’s the attraction? You can keep your home phone number, you can use your existing phones, you buy a base unit that plugs into your router, and…drum roll please…it costs $3.95 a month. A tenth the cost of the landline and we still get most of the benefits of an actual landline through the virtual one.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are reasons why you might not want to do it. First and foremost, it uses the internet. If you have a lousy internet connection, this might not be great for you. Second, there can be slight lags in your conversation. It’s not as crystal clear as your regular Bell line, and sometimes there can be a half-second delay when you’re chatting. I have a friend who was using it, liked it, didn’t find the lag egregious, so we gave it a try. My wife thinks it’s fine, barely notices it. Third, there is the “emergency” situation. Most of the stubborn people say, “Oh, I need a landline in case there’s an emergency.” And if you have VOIP and your power or even just your internet is out, you have no phone. Cue the backup cell phones that we already have, so not much of a concern. As well, if you have to phone 911, the computer won’t know automatically where you live, so you’ll have to give the operator the address. Just as if you were calling from a cell phone.

In the end, we went with Ooma. I’d like to say I checked out 5-10 great providers and this was the best, but really I went with it because a friend had it and liked it, with her husband being a decent geek who did a bunch of that type of research before me. The base unit ran me $125 or so at Best Buy. Setup was relatively easy. You plug it into your router, it connects to the internet, downloads all the latest firmware, and you walk through account setup on the computer. 20 minutes later or so, you’re good to go with a temporary Ooma number. You can keep that number if you want, or put in a request to port your old home phone number over. You can even run them simultaneously if you want to try it and see if you’re okay with it before ditching your other landline.

You might be thinking, “Sure, how much is long-distance though?”. How about free anywhere in Canada? There is a glitch with other long-distance — whereas Bell didn’t care how much you ran up the first time, they just billed you after the fact, Ooma is pay as you go. So if you want to phone elsewhere, you have to put money on your account. Mind you at less than a penny per minute to call the U.S., it’s not like you have to put a lot of cash on the account, but you do have to put a little. Just like buying a phone card for long-distance, entirely through your online account too.

We’ve had no issues so far, porting was super easy. They offer you a whole bunch of extra features in the first month to get you to upgrade to Ooma Premiere ($14.95 a month) and the features are sweet. Better voicemail. Forwarding to your cell phone easily and with some extra conditions. Copies of your voicemails sent to you by email. Notifications by text or email that someone has left you a message at home. Even the option to have the phone listed in any area code in the country (i.e. if you want it to look like a B.C. number, you can have it be a B.C. number even if you’re living in Chicoutimi!). Great options, and only an extra $11 a month. Still well under the $40 I was paying before, on average. Yet we didn’t need most of them. We have voicemail, we can access it remotely, that’s good enough.

$4 a month instead of $40. Instead of $500 this year, it will cost $175 with the hardware. After this year, it will drop to $50 a year, pretty much what I was paying monthly under the old system with taxes. Oh, and that $3.95 a month? That includes your 911 emergency access fee, so it isn’t even Ooma charging you the full $4.

Likely we’ll think of ditching the landline altogether, but for now, I’m willing to live with the cost/benefit ratio. And I’m okay with saving $325 this year alone, even accounting for the new hardware cost.

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Cutting the cord – Part 2 – TV

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by  

As I mentioned in Part 1 (Cutting the cord – Part 1 – Internet), the core focus of the “cutting the cord” movement is on reducing costs and unbundling things to make them as cheap as possible. There’s a strong element of “freedom” in there, not unlike writers going the self-publishing route, people growing their own food, running businesses out of their house through the power of the internet, ordering glasses over the internet, etc. A lot of it is thumbing the nose at the established monopolies to say, “Well that may be how you THINK we should do it, but I can do it myself now, and I don’t need you.”

Of the five main areas (internet, TV, phone, cellular and hosting), by far the biggest focus is on cable TV. As I mentioned in the previous blog, I’m not talking about people thumbing their noses at TV because they think it is rotting people’s brains or they didn’t watch it to begin with, it is about how you consume TV and whether you get it from a monopolistic provider or if you get it some other way that is (likely) cheaper.

While the current form of the movement has gone legit, the pressure points have been around for years, often with lots of illegal solutions. People who had regular cable could pay for “descrambler” boxes that would give them pay-TV stations for free. Or dishes with special boxes that unlocked other channels too. Even, for a while, people splitting their cable feed where it entered the house so they could run it to multiple spots in the house without paying an “outlet fee” to the cable company (mostly eliminated now, but it did happen). Some people had US satellite dishes with U.S. post office boxes for billing, even if they were living elsewhere. Some people split their cable off the neighbour’s feed, and split the cost (or maybe didn’t even tell the neighbour!). While some of the people were just cheapskates, almost all of the solutions were double-edged — they were both illegal and a chance to thumb your nose at the established companies who said “there’s only one way to get the service, take it or leave it.”

In more recent times, there have been huge internet developments and people now have at least seven ways to consume TV differently that doesn’t require them to have a cable package subscription.

First and foremost, there is the still-illegal option of torrents. Putting aside the risk of malware, putting aside the bit of extra technical know-how to get it up and running, and putting aside the need to have a computer, it’s still illegal. You are downloading content that you don’t own and don’t have the rights to view. Often with peer-to-peer client sharing tools, which is the fancy way of saying that it downloads fast to you because it is downloading from hundreds of people with copies — and once you have a copy, your server usually starts sharing it too. You’re not only downloading and possessing illegal copies, you’re distributing too. Yikers. So what’s the upside? Massive availability of the latest shows. Movies in theatres, latest EPs of the hottest shows, no waiting for your theatre or TV or country to launch the show locally. If it’s out there, someone pirated it and made it available. Have I used torrents? Sure. Often when I missed an episode because my PVR didn’t tape. If I couldn’t find it online for watching through the cable offerings, it was out there on the net. But it’s not a long-term viable solution for daily TV consumption, at least not for most people. Too much overhead and tech, plus that whole (relatively minor) risk of going-to-jail-thing kind of turns them off. And no live sports. Ever. Usually not even taped sports.

Second, people turn to the easiest replacement for cable TV — services like VMedia (that some have somewhat incorrectly described as a Canadian TIVO equivalent, but I won’t quibble). It basically is the same as cable TV through cable or phone or dish, but it’s through the internet. There aren’t a lot of companies offering this service because, well, quite frankly it’s not a lot cheaper than regular TV costs. Add in the need for internet with a strong reliable connection, and some people are like, “Wait, I have to pay for VMedia AND for internet? Isn’t this supposed to SAVE me money?”. But the beauty of the VMedia-like service is that (a) it’s legal, (b) you get to keep your handy little TV guide and remote to page through current listings), (c) you get SPORTS with LIVE shows, and (d) you can add in a PVR option. It’s almost identical to your cable options, just works a bit different. A friend of mine has VMedia and it was a very strong contender for me when I was looking for a new option. Partly because it had the basic “menu” of shows to go through, a very easy transition both for me and my wife+son. But only marginally cheaper than what I had and, at the time, it had a very big LOSS — there was no easy PVR option. I was using my PVR for everything. If Castle was on Monday at 10:00, and I was watching TV, I wouldn’t watch it live. I’d wait until at least part-way through the hour and then watch it on PVR so I could skip commercials. Or I would watch something else and watch Castle later. I find it horrendously difficult watching live TV. One night I was watching, and there were 14 commercials in the middle of a special TV show. I really can’t take those long commercial break anymore — PVRing has ruined me for regular TV watching. Except sports, on that I seem to be okay, partly as the breaks aren’t usually for as long. So I ruled out VMedia last year for the lack of PVR option, and when I went to cut the cord this year, I re-considered it as an option as it now has a PVR option, but I was already committed to another (much cheaper) option.

Third, some people consider running something like Graboid. It is frequently described as being totally legal, that you can download all these shows for free, no risk. It’s totally untrue. Graboid is really just a torrent application that pulls from torrent sites and downloads the content to your computer. It isn’t legal, although it is slightly more legal than the raw torrent option as you don’t do any filesharing yourself and it usually doesn’t tell you where it’s pulling it from. A legal slight of hand, but not enough to make it legal. You can pay them $20 a month for better access (unlimited downloads, etc.), and some people think, “Well, I paid, so it’s all good.” No, you just paid them to let you download more stolen content than previously. It’s slicker than a torrent site, but it’s still not legal. I confess I fell for this one for awhile, they had a decent selection, and since I was only after TV shows, I didn’t notice anything strange. Then I happened to look at the movie offerings. And discovered that they had some of the movies that were STILL IN THEATRES. Here’s a red flag for you — if any site is showing you something that is still in theatres, particularly if it is just recently released, you are well into the illegal world. And downloading that stuff is a really good way to attract the interest of the companies being ripped off. I cancelled my Graboid account shortly thereafter.

Fourth, there is one option that exploits a big giant grey area with respect to online resources. If I go to ThePirateBay and download the latest episode of Castle, a law was probably broken somehow. My local providers signed contracts to have exclusive rights for set amounts of time and paid for the privilege so that they could make the money back selling advertising. Here I am, bypassing them entirely, accessing unlicensed content and DOWNLOADING it. That point is important. By contrast, if I go to CTV.CA and pull the same episode off their site and STREAM it from them, no issue. It’s freely available, but they show me advertising with it. Interestingly, I can go to ABC.COM or NBC.COM or CBS.COM and try to get this week’s shows from them, and I’ll be blocked — if you’re not in the U.S., you’re blocked entirely. Enter live streaming through a program like KODI. It used to be called XBMC video player, and while I had looked at it, it held little interest for me. Too techie in the config, not very user-friendly, and quite frankly, I couldn’t get it to work hardly at all. Plus I had other video players, so why bother?

Well, the program improved and became a new product altogether — Kodi. It is slick, it has decent menus, it has a reliable code base, lots of online user supports, etc. And what does it do besides play music or local videos or show local photos? It streams from the internet. Give it a URL of an internet stream, more or less, and it will stream just fine. And therein lies the grey area — streaming isn’t illegal. You didn’t make a copy of anything. You didn’t download anything. You didn’t share anything. You just watched what someone else put on the net. And you didn’t pay them anything for it, they don’t even know who you are. Most jurisdictions have no legal block for this activity. You can watch it because YOU didn’t do anything illegal and nobody is profiting from it through payments or advertising. So Kodi users around the world have set up free feeds. Streams of U.S. websites that are streaming it for free already. Some are streaming from copies on their own servers. Thousands of options, you don’t see hardly any of it. Because you don’t care. There’s nothing illegal about it for you. Sure, maybe the person who is streaming it might be doing something legal, illegal, or quasi-legal in whatever jurisdiction they are in, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are no Canadian / American / European / Australian laws that say there is anything wrong with watching something someone else put on the net. You don’t possess it at any time, you don’t own it at any time, you don’t share it at any time, you just watch. And while it does require a bit of setup to get it working on your computer, once it is up and running, everything is available. TV shows. Movies (although again, lots of pirated material in there that shouldn’t be, and easy enough to avoid). You want to see episodes of Castle? Yep, they’re available. Not just the latest episodes, all eight seasons, including the latest from this past week. It is way more manual than a standard cable package, but I PVRed everything already — this is like the entire internet is my PVR. Sure, it buffers occasionally (hence the faster internet package).

Now, you might think, “Well, that’s okay for the basic user, but I’m a heavy consumer, it wouldn’t work for me.” I know you might think that because I thought that too. I’m a much heavier than average user (not just physically, hehehe). I treat premiere season like some people treat fantasy football. I rate shows, I pick ones to watch, I review them, I add or dump some. And I raise the average hours watched per week considerably. I love serialized story telling. I love revisiting the same characters from the week before in a new story. I’m the same way with books — I prefer series whenever possible, and I’ll binge read as much as I will binge watch. NetFlix, Crave TV, Shomi, are all options for me, and I consumed them too. Up until I got Kodi. And this is the best part. You can try Kodi without doing ANYTHING on your existing cable package. Leave it exactly as is and try Kodi with no need to commit to ending anything or starting anything. It’s just a program to run on your computer. Like it? Keep it. Don’t like it? Don’t keep it. No risk at all.

I tried it over the summer, a few shows here and there. I basically wanted to evaluate it before I got to the fall premiere season. Turned out, I wasn’t watching my PVR anymore. Shows were still taping, but I was just watching them online instead. I weaned myself off the cable provider teat over two months. I have a laptop in my basement, so it was easy to add to the configuration. Kodi is like having Netflix, except with almost every show that has ever been shown, AND with current TV episodes available too, not just previous seasons. So my basement config was good to go.

The first-floor TV however was a different kettle of fish. It is generally used by my son and wife, neither of whom consume a lot of TV, occasionally NetFlix or regular cable offerings, and are not that interested in figuring out how to work tech solutions to get to their shows. If I cut the cable, they would lose their feeds upstairs too. Was there an easy option for them? It turns out there was. There are Android TV boxes that are sold, including a decent option by MyGica. Rather than having to attach a Windows PC to the TV, like the laptop in the basement, I can hook up the Android TV box, basically a little mini-computer running Android just like a tablet or phone but with full internet ports, USB ports, HDMI ports, etc. And oh look, there are NetFlix apps, a Kodi app, you can run the browser if you want to surf, etc. Is it as easy as the previous cable option? No, not quite, but they can do 90% of what they had been doing with two clicks. My wife tried it and said, “Okay, this will work.”

So, why doesn’t everyone go for the Kodi option? Four reasons:

  1. It’s more technical. You have to add some configurations, play with software setup, etc.
  2. You lose the live programming menu. I wasn’t using it much anyway, but if you often find yourself watching whatever happens to be on right then, without caring what you are watching, simple consumption browsing isn’t quite as easy.
  3. Grey area doesn’t mean white. Some people still worry about the legality of it. If you are, simple solution until the law becomes clear — run a VPN for $5 a month that hides your IP address. It is actually a good security practice ANYWAY, even if you aren’t doing streaming, i.e. highly recommended by most security advisors to protect your home computer from hackers and malware.
  4. Sports. Live sports is really hard to get, particularly if you want local stuff.

Most of the people who consume sports say this is the silver bullet for them…they can’t get their hockey, football, soccer, etc. I’m not a huge sports watcher to begin with, but occasionally we watch a hockey game or football game. Or golf. Or a lot when the Olympics are on. My son, age 6, really likes hockey now and wants to watch the Canadiens play. I thought this would kill us, which would lead to one of the extra options below (OTA), but I ended up with a free NHL Gamecentre subscription this season because I have a big Rogers cell package. It even comes with, you guessed it, an ANDROID app that runs on the MyGICA box. Instant hockey. Plus I found a bunch of feeds in Kodi called the SportsDevil add on that has amazing sports feeds. Half the time I end up watching those rather than the official feeds, just easier and sometimes more stable. With no regional blackouts either.

Hockey? All the NHL games are there. American football? There. Including some of the ones that are only available with super sports packages that cost you $200 a year. Soccer? Are you kidding me? They have every league around the world, teams you have never even heard of at levels you may not have heard of either. Baseball? MLB absolutely. After that, it starts to get a bit spotty. NASCAR, most golf, volleyball, etc. Few feeds likely for your local provincial teams (junior hockey, etc.) but they were hard to come by on regular cable too. A few weeks ago I was in Lindsay, and my brother-in-law wanted to watch the Eagles game. None of the local sports bars had the game, it was available on super sports packages only, and they didn’t subscribe. Yet we could have watched it on my laptop — I could get the feed, but I was trying to run it through the McDonald’s wifi, and it was buffering like crazy. I did a bit better at a local coffee shop, but still spotty. If we could have found a good hotspot, we were golden. I’ve been pretty happy with the options, nothing has been unavailable yet when I went looking. A bit more manual, harder to find than just clicking on a channel on your cable box, but doable.

Fifth, people decide to just ignore the current TV season. Instead, they subscribe for $10 a month to NetFlix, or less for Shomi or CraveTV, and get access to previous seasons of tons of TV shows and movies. All great options, but again, if you are like me, and you want the latest episodes, you need a stronger option.

Sixth, people go for “website” options. For this, you probably need the VPN option mentioned above. If you try to access ABC.COM, it will let you get all the way to the part where you play the video and then it will tell you the content is not available in your region. It knows you are connecting from Canada. So, no show for you. However, if you first connect to your VPN service ($5/mth), and it is based in the U.S. (most are), then the network website thinks YOU are in the U.S. too and plays the content just fine. If you can find it on a Cdn website, play it there; if not, go VPN, and watch it on the U.S. site. The downside is not everything is available, usually not for previous seasons, usually not for more than a few weeks, and often with ads with it. Plus you have to search multiple sites for multiple shows. It works, but it was too much work for me. Note that this is often no different than running Kodi — some of the feeds are the same source, it just tricks the computer into thinking you are already in the U.S., without the need for a VPN. However, the website option worked GREAT for recent election results — I watched the CBC website rather than the CBC stream through Kodi, just in the website browser (Android version upstairs, regular Firefox downstairs). The website feed was perfect. Which is likely what I’ll do for the Olympics too when it comes, just boot up the browser.

Seventh and finally, people go the OTA option. OTA stands for “over the air” and is basically reminiscent of the old rabbit ears setups people remember either from early TVs or setups they had at cottages, etc. While the fancy options now don’t look like simple rabbit ears, they work pretty much the same way. You wire it into the back of your TV or to a box and then to your TV, and the antenna pulls the feed from the air by tuning the receiver to whatever frequency the channel is being broadcast through the air. The options for this are pretty extensive, and the results are varied — depends on the variables.

First and foremost, this isn’t much of an option if you live in a rural area. Or rather, you may already be doing this, but you only get a channel or two. Large urban centres likely have multiple channels to choose from. Ottawa has up to about 15. All free over the air broadcasts, and since it is all digital now, pretty dang good quality signals to pull in. Not that snow you remember from the cottage, or attaching extra pieces of foil to extend the reception or trying to hold it at a specific angle. Second, it depends on if you live in a house or an apartment. If you are in a single level house, with a big antenna, you may not get great reception compared to the guy who lives in an apartment building downtown on the 20th floor with just a little antenna out the window and perfect sight lines. Third is the antenna itself. External / outdoor ones pull in better signals than internal / indoor ones, bigger is usually better than smaller, and the best yet is probably an external one hooked to a rotor that will let it turn the antenna for better reception depending on the channel you want.

Ottawa has two towers, one to the North-East, one to the South-West, and depending on which channel you want, you can get better reception pointing towards one of the two. You can get a better setup with a rotor so that if you choose Channel 1, and it is on the NE tower, the little machine tells the rotor to angle NE; if you choose Channel 2, and it’s on SW tower, it will rotate to the SW. Once it is set up, you never have to worry about it again, it moves on its own. Completely free. Completely legal. You end up with an antenna on your roof probably and some wires coming in, but the main constraint is the number of channels you get. Anywhere from 3 to 15 depending on where you live. I was considering doing this at home in order to get the local feeds, which would have been perfect for watching the news or the Olympics when it is on. Same with local hockey games. But with the GameCentre pack, plus Kodi, my wife has said they’re covered for now. I might do it in the future, and there are some cheap internal antenna solutions ($30) I could try first, before going to a full outdoor antenna with a rotor setup (about $350 for equipment and installation).

Why did I go Kodi? Because it wasn’t that complicated to set it up or run it once it was set up, the tutorials were dirt simple to follow, and oh yeah, it’s completely free. I’ll add a VPN soon for about $5 a month, which is pretty dang good considering I was paying Rogers $85 a month before. I had to shell out $200 for the MyGica box (there are cheaper options available, I went for faster processor, later version of Android, and more ports), and I added a wireless keyboard for the remote for $30 (purchased previously downstairs, but ended up not needing it down there). Bought a long HDMI cable too, $40. Overall, I’ll spend $300-$350 for the first year, compared to $1020 last year, and about $60 a year going forward.

Not too shabby a savings. For $700 saved in the first year, and $950 a year after that, I’ll put up with a bit more manual configuration and a couple of hours of tweaking the setup to be exactly what I want and use.

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Cutting the cord – Part 1 – Internet

The Writing Life of a Tadpole Posted on by 2

Most people have seen the headlines, advertisements, tweets, blogs all with a similar headline to mine — “Cutting the cord”. Generally it refers to people who have ditched cable TV. Unfortunately, every article comes with 500 comments that say “I cancelled cable, and I don’t regret it, I never watched TV anyway.” Congratulations, you cancelled something you weren’t using. How very strategic of you. Perhaps you can also cut off your head for the same reason. Once you get past the idiots, the next wave is the holier-than-thous who say, “No one should ever watch TV anytime, anyplace, anywhere, it’s all crap.” Again, they can join the idiots with cranial extraction. I have no time for either group, and neither have anything to do with what “cutting the cord” is all about.

The primary goal of “cutting the cord” is to be able to generally access whatever you want, whenever you want, without having to pay for things you don’t want. In other words, TV bundling. TV bundling is where Rogers or Bell or Shaw or LocalMonopolyProvider says, “Great, you can have TV, but you have to take these 30 channels where 15 of them are things you’ll never watch”, and charge you $30-$50 for the startup bundle. After that, you usually can’t do complete a la carte ordering of the rest of the channels you are interested in as often they are bundled too — such as “Speciality channel package 1” that will come with Bravo and Showcase, plus three others I’ll never watch for $5.00. If I take Bravo and Showcase separately, they’ll charge me, say, $3.00 each. So I take the bundle to save a $1 on buying them individually but then I start wondering about the business model. How can they charge me $3 each for five stations, how can they bundle all 5 and reduce it from $15 to $5? Easy. The other three stations are worthless to most subscribers. They’re the toys in the Extra Value meals at fast food places…most of them are worthless, interesting for about ten seconds and then your kid has moved on.

The CRTC has been pushed and are now pushing for TV providers to change their bundling options to reduce the initial bundle cost as well as reduce the overall cost of bigger bundles. In the meantime, a bunch of people have said, “Umm, you know you can find most shows online now, right? There are other ways to get the feed without paying bundled pricing to one company.”

And that is where the movement started. It has blossomed since then to be more about “what services are you paying for that you can get cheaper through third-party providers?”. In general, this comes down to five areas for most people — internet service itself, cable TV, home phone, cellular service, and if applicable, internet hosting. Let me talk about my experience.

Internet service

I live in Ottawa, and that pretty much meant up until a few years ago that you either went with Bell for phone internet or Rogers for cable internet. Lots of deregulation happened, and lots of little internet providers started cropping up to offer phone-based internet. I had Bell for awhile, and then switched to the National Capital Freenet. In theory, I could run NCF with a static IP address which would allow me to run my own server at home to host my personal website. I played with the setup a bit, ran some configs on a couple of Linux boxes, got things to the point where I could start playing with it. And then reality hit me. I had no real interest in running my own server! 🙂 Put differently, I have no support behind me. If I screw something up, I have no “better geek” to call to say, “I need this fixed asap, here’s my chequebook.” If it went down, it would be down until I figured out why and how to get it back up. I’m an okay geek, I can install routers, set up Windows, wire things from A to B, do some basic troubleshooting. But if WordPress suddenly crashes, I probably have no chance of finding where the problem lies if I can’t even get online and reset the setup. So I gave up sometime ago on running my own server setup. It’s just a layer of tech I’m not willing to take on. I’ll come back to internet hosting at the end, I just mention it in passing as I tried NCF for sometime.

Then, NCF started messing up, my connection wasn’t that stable, and I experienced what is frequently the challenge with third-party providers. Sure, they’re cheaper. Why? Because they don’t pay the overhead all of the big guys do. Like 24/7 extended support. Like people who can visit your house to fix the problem on short notice. They did the best they could, but it was looking like a wiring problem, something they can’t fix. Bell owns the phone wires, and did the wiring in the house. So eventually I bundled it back up, went back to Bell (they were providing my home phone and satellite service anyway), got it all resolved, etc. A few years later, I moved to a new house, hadn’t liked the Bell dish going out in bad weather or high winds, and switched to Rogers. Along with Rogers cable internet. Worked fine, rarely any issues, even in a house where I had to run some extra wires from the first floor router to the basement office (I really prefer not to go full wireless in the house for main computers if I can avoid it). Worked fine, and when I moved again, I moved everything to Rogers.

I have a small secret. One of the biggest complaints for any of the companies is that the Customer Service Reps are frequently horrible for tier 1, first level support. Just as I was about to move, a Rogers agent called me to ask if I wanted home monitoring — I didn’t, but while she was calling anyway, I asked her if I was going to do the move, who I needed to speak to in order to make all the changes. She said she could do it. Here’s the secret — she was flat-out, hands-down, awesome. At this point, I had Rogers cable, Rogers internet, I added Rogers home phone, and I had Rogers cellular too. We reviewed ALL of it. And I do mean all of it. We went through each and every service, talked about options, and each and every time I asked a question, she either already knew the answer or clicked four buttons somewhere and came up with the options. All that bundling was complicated, it pushes even my limits, and she kept it all straight, understood exactly what I wanted and didn’t want, gave me options, recommended certain choices and explained why. It took just over an hour, and I never phased her once nor did I ever lose confidence in her performance. She didn’t oversell, she didn’t undersell, she was a customer’s dream representative. And when we finished the call, she gave me the office direct number and her name so that if I had any other questions, I could call her again. She still works there, I’ve spoken to her twice since. And no, I won’t tell you her name or give you the extension. She is MY secret and I am NOT going sharesies.

Fast forward three years, and I have had no problems with my Rogers cable Internet service. It just plain worked from Day 1. Well, maybe Day 2, I did have to do some setup. Rented the modem, and upgraded at one point in there to stronger modem/router combo when we finished the basement so that I could get a stronger wifi signal down there. Other than that, happy with just about everything.

Except the price. I was paying about $80 (excluding some bundling discounts) for unlimited internet, 5 Mbps upload speed and 25 Mbps download. Lots of deals were out with other companies, even Bell. But all of them were for phone internet. I honestly don’t care whether it is phone or cable, generally, just whether it works, and I have a theory about most people’s experiences with one or the other.

Most people are probably average users and are fine with either one. Maybe even 80% of them. It will work fine. Maybe some tweaks, etc., but both will work. Then there is another 5% who cannot work well with either setup…either their own computer setup is wrong, or they’re just idiots, the service isn’t going to work because the problem isn’t the service. And that leaves 15% where there is a definitive difference in quality of service. For example, there are pe ople who are with Bell, have problems with their service, undergo repeated attempts to fix it, and it just keeps being a problem. No matter what they try, it’s just a pain. So they switch, often to someone like Rogers. And suddenly it works. They think it’s a Bell problem, the whole company is the devil’s spawn, blah blah blah, and they like to complain loud and long about it on every forum they can think of, often with a very clear message “Rogers is better and anyone who is still with Bell is just an idiot.” Sitting right next door to them is a Rogers customer. They too had a problem, tried repeatedly to fix it, got nowhere, finally gave up, switched to Bell, and are now the voice of the newly-converted. Bell can do no wrong, Rogers is the devil’s spawn. Sound familiar? It has nothing probably to do with either company. It was just the wires in the house, local config, neighborhood, maybe local interference that was the problem. Not Bell vs. Rogers.

So when I saw all these “cheaper” companies, I balked. Mainly because they were only offering phone internet, and I’ve never tested the wires in the house. The phone wiring looks like it was done by a nervous and forgetful squirrel. Some of the jacks didn’t even “register”. It didn’t fill me with confidence. And if Rogers was working relatively perfectly for me, why mess with a good thing?

Well, here’s the kicker. I decided to make some other changes (discussed later), and I found out something kind of exciting. TekSavvy offered cable internet. In my neighbourhood. Cheaper, but with a slightly different configuration. I looked into it, basically all I would have to do is swap physical equipment, no need for anyone to come to my house to do anything with wires, it would be the identical setup as with Rogers outside, and they would just throw a switch somewhere. It sounded very enticing. Yet I hesitated.

So much of what I do in the house for other stuff, and the future changes, would depend on the internet working reliably. My wife is doing a semester of education this fall, and she needs internet access. Was now REALLY the right time to consider the switch? She was willing, partly for the cost savings, and because we also have our phones or wifi nearby. If it was messed up for a few days, I could get it fixed or working or just go back to what we had. I pulled the plug.

My new package with TekSavvy had same upload speeds (5 Mbps), which was interesting only as Rogers speed tests had never pushed above 3 Mbps. I don’t do a LOT of uploading, but occasionally when I’m backing up to the cloud, some reliable speed is good. TekSavvy’s tests have me at 4.9 Mbps every time, and a couple of times, I broke 5 (5.1, 5.2). No idea why, but it did.

Download speeds with Rogers was theoretically at 25, I would regularly top out at the 20 Mbps range. No biggie, I’m not a huge torrent freak, but I like to get what I pay for when I am downloading. TekSavvy is rated to 30, and I top out at…29.7 so far. Yep, almost exactly as advertised.

The big change is that I am no longer on unlimited transfers per month. The limit is 400 GB. I could drop it to 150 GB and save $10  a month, but thought I would start with 400 for the first few months while I’m figuring out backups to cloud storage too for some other stuff. I might leave it there, I might drop it. I could go up to unlimited for about another $10. Instead, I’m paying $55 a month. In other words, $25 a month less than I was paying for Rogers, although with slightly faster speeds and lower monthly bandwidth allowances. Rogers gave me a counter-offer, would have only been about $10 more than TekSavvy, so within the ballpark.

In the first year, that’s only $300 savings, and the new hardware cost me $200 (I bought the modem / router rather than renting it). I also added another switchbox to the mix, cost me $25 or so, but that was something I had been meaning to do for awhile, just hadn’t gotten around to it. When I had the basement finished, I had wires run from my 2nd floor office to the basement TV area and to the front-room TV area. Internet wiring to each. Actually two to the basement (one for TV, one for games). So, I kind of feel like I come out even for the first year. After that, $300 less per year isn’t a bad savings.

I know there are lots of people who will say, “Oh, TekSavvy sucks, you should be with x”. For me, it’s a lot like the Rogers/Bell fanatics. The only thing that matters is if it works, and mine does. If it stops working, or slows down drastically, I can always switch to someone else. And I’ll be a lot more willing to do that after I made a lot of other changes with Rogers setup already (more to come later). I’m with TekSavvy for my ISP, and that’s it. No other bundling with them. As such, I feel much more in control of my setup and costs.

As long as it works, no need to drastically change. The rate is pretty good, the service is excellent. I didn’t “cut the cord” and get rid of the internet, but I did trim the cost a bit. On to the other areas…

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