Let me tell you a little story of a company that decided we needed them more than they needed us, and how wrong they were.
When we first moved into our house in December 1996 all we had available for Internet was dial-up.
We had three POTS1 lines installed so I could work from home on occasion. Lantronix paid for two lines, one for business voice and one for data, and we got billed separately for our private land-line.
We are in a fringe area so we signed up with Cox Communications for cable TV service. As I recall, at that time we were paying under $50/month for a pretty good cable package.
As time went by we had all three POTS lines removed and signed up for high-speed Internet with Cox, upgraded our cable box to add DVR functionality and signed up for land line phone through Cox
When we first signed up I think I was getting something like 20 Mbps down and 10 up. This was so much faster than a 5600bps dial up modem I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Lantronix paid for that connection until a big cost-cutting binge along about 2015 or so, but even so I think we were paying Cox around $120/month for Cable TV, Internet and a landline phone. Seemed like a pretty good deal.
At this point I was enthusiastically recommending Cox Communications to everyone.
Then Cox started bumping up their prices. When we got to the point where we were paying Cox over $200/month we cut the cord for TV, but we were still paying anything up to $150/month for Internet and a land-line.
I kept trying to cancel the land-line, but we would have lost our “bundle” price and would have been paying about the same and would have had to buy our own cable modem.
At regular intervals ranging from 6 months to 18 months our bill would suddenly shoot up $50/month or so, and I would get on the phone with Cox and dicker until they could “find” us an “introductory rate” or whatever. Usually we’d still wind up paying $5 or $10/month more, but we were stuck.
The reason we had switched from the old land-line to Cox was that there was a lot of noise on the phone company’s twisted-pair copper lines into our house, probably because they were installed in 1978 and had degraded over time.
This meant that DSL, our only other option at the time, wouldn’t work. So we were stuck with Cox for High Speed Internet, which was now up to about 500Mb/s down and 30Mbps up. I doubt we could have gone much faster, the Cox co-ax was the same age as the phone lines and in pretty bad shape.
Cox limits us to something line 1275 GB of data per month. I’ve been doing a lot of photo and video organizing, using Microsoft’s One Drive and Apple’s iCloud to store and transfer files between phones, PCs and my Mac, and I’ve run up against the Cox data limit more than once. It’s annoying.
I could upgrade my plan (for an even higher exorbitant monthly rate), or just be careful how much data I was transferring to and from the cloud.
Every time I had occasion to talk to anyone at Cox I’d tell them that the first company that offered usable speed at under $100/month would get my business.
That time has come.
About two weeks ago a young man knocked on our door and offered us Verizon High Speed Internet via 5G cellular service, 30 day free trial, $55/month after that for at least three years, unlimited data, saving us about $95/month.
Top download speed is around 300 Mbps down and about 20 up. A little slower than Cox, but still usable.
We’ve been using the Verizon connection for video streaming for about two weeks and haven’t had any problems. If anything, I think we’re getting less buffering than we were with Cox at prime time because we’re not sharing bandwidth with our neighbors.
This new box is both an Internet Gateway and WiFi router. It has two wired Ethernet ports so I plugged it into my wired Ethernet network, which has my Windows PC, the downstairs main TV (75” 4K) and several other wired Ethernet devices connected to it.
I don’t currently have a wired connection to the old flatscreen TV in our bedroom, so I connected the Apple TV connected to it via WiFi.
The WiFi signal downstairs was very weak so Verizon shipped us a repeater, free of charge.
I had some technical issues setting it up but after working with a very competent tech support agent for a couple of hours it’s now working great.
If either of us had thought to do a factory reset early in the call we’d have saved a lot of time, but that’s the way it is with Tech Support. I should know.
I think he was just glad to be talking to someone who knew something about how WiFi networks work.
Verizon’s gateway has a separate “IoT” channel that I’ve connected a smart light-switch and several Amazon Echos to. I know there are some Echos that I still need to re-configure.
I also reconfigured our existing Netgear Orbi mesh network as an Access Point with the old network name and passkey so any devices I missed can still communicate. So I can reconfigure Echos and anything else I’ve missed at my leasure.
We have a Sunrun solar power system and it needs to connect to our WiFi, so if I take the Orbis down it’ll lose connection and they’ll have to send a tech out so I can help them connect their controllers to the IoT channel.2
And, even though the Verizon network has a Guest channel I figure I’ll just have any guests connect through the Orbi’s guest channel.
I’m going to wait another week, and if no major issues pop up I will have the major satisfaction of walking the Cox modem into the Cox store about two miles away and let them know that we are no longer Cox customers.
I’m looking forward to it.
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I may have more news on my crusade to get a battery added to our solar power system soon. Stay tuned.