The Adventures of MDawg II

Quote: MDawg

Anyone who has cable service (at this house we have cable internet, landline telephone and TV), knows that every couple years as the "promotional" discounts expire, your bill goes up - sometimes as much as 30%, or even more. So you call, get some "Loyalty Retention Department" and wait while they calculate how much they may bring your bill down, which still typically ends up being about 20% higher no matter what they do.

Arguments such as "Everything else in technology is going down, why is cable service going up?" fall on deaf ears.

Our "promotions" ran out recently and when I called in advance of expiration of the discounts with a sort of peremptory challenge to see what they could do, the best they could come up with was about two hundred fifty a month, versus the two twenty had been paying previously. That didn't sound like the greatest deal so I just left it alone until last week, when I did have to call as the promotions had now expired, and the bill was heading north - it turns out - was going to settle at about $290.!

This time, the best the guy could do was about two hundred sixty 😅. I brought up that when I had called before, two fifty was available, and after some adjustments, he got it back to that and I closed the deal at two fifty - for another two years.

Amazing how the bad deal of a month ago sounds acceptable today.

Something like when real estate was skyrocketing even more than it is lately, and the full price of two years ago, becomes the steal of today.
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Every two years I call up Directv to cancel service when my promo rate ends. When you call to cancel they will transfer you to the retention group which eventually offers the same rate they are giving new customers.

We have a different provider, and I talk to that same retention group but they stopped matching the exact same price as we were paying before some years ago. Now the best they can do is to knock the price down some, but it always ends up higher than the previous.

I have tried switching the name on the account too, to restart everything at the new customer price, but that's such a pain don't bother any longer, just accept the increase every two years now.

I still don't accept that the providers should be charging more, versus less, for everything, but they get away with it somehow. Cell phone bills do go down, but we don't have these with our ISP / landline / TV provider.


DirecTV is via satellite? My parents were the first in our neighborhood to get a satellite it was a big dish you had to adjust manually, but even in those early days you had to pay to pay, where a lot of the good content was scrambled.

After 25 years I disconnected from Time Warner/Spectrum and got T-Mobile 5G Home Internet & YouTubeTV. I expect to save $100 a month on that. Now my pre-2018 wi-fi printer/scanner won't scan, so I may have to use a USB cable to get that going again. It prints, but won't scan on the wi-fi, go figure. For pre-2018 equipment, you have to dial down the security a notch and go with 2.4 Ghz on a sub-network. It was working fine for a month, then the 5G Gateway got an update and rebooted and my printer/scanner wouldn't connect the scanner portion again. I did spend 95 minutes on the phone to T-Mobile tech support the first time to get it going. I'm just gonna go with they FUBAR'ed the Gateway until the next update.
Spectrum is sending new customer ads to get me back, I'm still waiting for a refund of $41 after 6 weeks. I'm also waiting for a $200 gift card from T-Mobile for signing up for Home Internet, but that's gonna take at least 10 weeks to arrive.
I'd go back to Spectrum for DOCSIS 4.0 internet at 300 Mbps down & 300 Mbps up for $50/month as an evergreen price. They are incapable of going more than a year without nearly doubling the prices.
There's a new law going into effect that requires Spectrum to tell everybody how much they charge including fees etc. All they ever do is tell you the promo price for new customers, never how much customers are paying after 1 year until you get the bill.

Isn't via physical line (cable or fiber optic) the only way to get the really fast, and reliable, internet?

I'm going out on a limb trying out this 5G Home Internet. I had to move the 5G Gateway to another room next to a window near my bed. It was next to my 30 year old boombox and that didn't accept the interference so I had to retire the boombox and move it away. The Gateway puts out interference up to 2 to 3 feet away. In that room, I can get 100 Mbps down and 60-80 Mbps up, but in the room where all the stuff is it's about half that speed. There's some 1080p60fps YouTube videos that have a hard time being played that wouldn't be having problems on a 300/10 coax cable. But I had to upload 100 GB to One Drive this week and it goes 3 to 4X faster than Spectrum, so it's a trade-off. People who video stream and upload a lot are really chafing at the bit over Spectrum's low upload speed. The FCC just said it's too slow too, lol.

T-Mobile has a 15 day trial period for free, and you can return their Gateway if it doesn't work out before you cut your cable service.
The 5G Gateway is portable where cable just isn't. If you take a 1 week vacation, you can take it with you, but there may or may not be any 5G in your vacation spot.

T-Mobile just imposed a 1.2 TB monthly allotment before they throttle your internet. So if your TV is on non-stop, you'll likely hit that. If you watch a lot of 4K content, it will be too easy to hit that. If you're a gamer playing in 4K and downloading 750 GB of games a week, you'll hit that. They deprioritize your signal for the rest of the billing period and in some markets there may be no difference, but I just imagine it's gonna crash to a crawl for most everybody else.
I've got a dumb TV with a Roku 3 on it, so that's how I watch TV these days.

Quote: MDawg

Isn't via physical line (cable or fiber optic) the only way to get the really fast, and reliable, internet?
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Yes, the fastest is still wired even though there are some very fast wireless. I have 1Gb up and down over fiber but I know there are still a lot faster out there.

Quote: DRich

Quote: MDawg

Isn't via physical line (cable or fiber optic) the only way to get the really fast, and reliable, internet?
link to original post

Yes, the fastest is still wired even though there are some very fast wireless. I have 1Gb up and down over fiber but I know there are still a lot faster out there.
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I had 1gb with Comcast up until a couple months ago when I switched plans for a cheaper one and now I've got 200 and I can't tell the difference. Works exactly like it did when it was 800. Of course I live alone and there's no other demand on it, it's not like I'm living with three kids and we're all using the internet at the same time.

Quote: EvenBob

Quote: DRich

Quote: MDawg

Isn't via physical line (cable or fiber optic) the only way to get the really fast, and reliable, internet?
link to original post

Yes, the fastest is still wired even though there are some very fast wireless. I have 1Gb up and down over fiber but I know there are still a lot faster out there.
link to original post

I had 1gb with Comcast up until a couple months ago when I switched plans for a cheaper one and now I've got 200 and I can't tell the difference. Works exactly like it did when it was 800. Of course I live alone and there's no other demand on it, it's not like I'm living with three kids and we're all using the internet at the same time.
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Yes, 200mb is enough for most people unless you are planning on streaming more than 4 streams at a time.

Quote: DRich

Quote: EvenBob

Quote: DRich

Quote: MDawg

Isn't via physical line (cable or fiber optic) the only way to get the really fast, and reliable, internet?
link to original post

Yes, the fastest is still wired even though there are some very fast wireless. I have 1Gb up and down over fiber but I know there are still a lot faster out there.
link to original post

I had 1gb with Comcast up until a couple months ago when I switched plans for a cheaper one and now I've got 200 and I can't tell the difference. Works exactly like it did when it was 800. Of course I live alone and there's no other demand on it, it's not like I'm living with three kids and we're all using the internet at the same time.
link to original post

Yes, 200mb is enough for most people unless you are planning on streaming more than 4 streams at a time.
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My cats very seldom use the internet so I'm good. I spend most of my time looking at YouTube and Pornhub and playing roulette, How much bandwidth do I really need.

The 10 largest casinos in Clark County based on square footage for gaming, as of December 2023, according to a Nevada Gaming Control Board report.

Wynn Las Vegas (including Encore):191,424
Sunset Station: 163,951
MGM Grand: 156,524
Bellagio: 156,000
Aria: 152,550
Mandalay Bay: 152,000
Santa Fe Station: 151,001
South Point: 146,002
Green Valley Ranch: 143,890
The Orleans: 137,000

I didn't realize Station Casinos had such a large footprint.

And Red Rock (2645) and Durango (2330) have the two largest number of slot machines in Clark County, for those of you who like to push dem buttons.

Quote: MDawg

The 10 largest casinos in Clark County based on square footage for gaming, as of December 2023, according to a Nevada Gaming Control Board report.

Wynn Las Vegas (including Encore):191,424
Sunset Station: 163,951
MGM Grand: 156,524
Bellagio: 156,000
Aria: 152,550
Mandalay Bay: 152,000
Santa Fe Station: 151,001
South Point: 146,002
Green Valley Ranch: 143,890
The Orleans: 137,000

I didn't realize Station Casinos had such a large footprint.

And Red Rock (2645) and Durango (2330) have the two largest number of slot machines in Clark County, for those of you who like to push dem buttons.
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Wow, I would have never guessed Wynn was the largest.

Got a few friends free tickets to Phish last night.









Looks like it was about as visual as the U2 concerts we saw at the Sphere in 2023.

Watched this Danish movie Another Round (2020) last night. Four high school teachers in the hard drinking country of Denmark (almost as bad as Iceland - I've been to both, and to Sweden, and they all love to drink) try an experiment, maintaining their blood alcohol concentration at 0.05% based on a theory that humans are alcohol deficient and need exactly 0.05% to function optimally.

There are those too who believe they function best high on marijuana?

Quote: MDawg

Watched this Danish movie Another Round (2020) last night. Four high school teachers in the hard drinking country of Denmark (almost as bad as Iceland - I've been to both, and to Sweden, and they all love to drink) try an experiment, maintaining their blood alcohol concentration at 0.05% based on a theory that humans are alcohol deficient and need exactly 0.05% to function optimally.

There are those too who believe they function best high on marijuana?
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Nobody functions at their best when they're high on weed but it's a fact that things like writing can be better if you're drinking. That's why there are so many alcoholic famous writers. Alcohol improves your ability weed we just stunts it. One of my favorite stories is the famous comedian Buddy Hackett, way back in the late 40s was just starting his career in nightclubs and he would finish his set and hang out with the band and smoke dope for a couple hours every night. He thought his career was doing great and that he was writing the best jokes and he was going to be really famous until his agent told him one day he wasn't going anywhere. He was totally stuck in non-creative rut and he better get out of it. He realized it was the dope smoking that was doing it, he could not be creative by smoking that stuff everyday. He quit and his career took off like gangbusters.