Cutting The Cable Part 7

My Time Warner Cable bill is $250 per month so I am cutting back the cable bill!

In my neck of the woods, Time Warner has a monopoly on high speed Internet. The only real competition is DSL, which doesn't come close to my bandwidth requirements.

Verizon is moving into the region and running fiber optic to every house. They plan to provide an alternative to Time Warner. But so far the roll out has been pretty slow.

I called Verizon tonight to check on availability in my area. Unfortunately, there is none. Which means Time Warner remains my only option.

Since I was talking to Verizon, I decided to right-size my cell phone bill. Verizon recently dropped their prices. Also, I have a 3GB plan and never use more than .5GB, so I dropped the plan to 2GB and will monitor my usage and consider going to 1GB later. Finally, I asked if I qualify for any promotional discounts - and I did! All together? I dropped my two smart phone cell bill from $144 per month to $109 a month. That is $410 per year!

Getting a smaller cell phone bill wasn't part of my cable cutting plan - but I'll take it! And add it to my cable savings, totally my monthly savings with this project at $100 per month so far!

Great Experience with Ooma

I have two Ooma boxes and I have had great success with Ooma.  Ooma allowed me to drop from a $42 per month telephone bill to a $3.50 bill. Before I made my purchase, I read many reviews  (mostly negative reviews) so I knew what I was getting into. I then compared the negative reviews to my experience to try to understand why some people had bad experiences. From that, I have made the following recommendations so that you can have the best possible experience.

Before I show my suggestions, my disclaimer: I dot work for Ooma. I have no connection to Ooma other than being a customer. My good experience is no guaranty of your experience, so, don't blame me if your experience differs.

My suggestions:

A. If you want to keep your existing phone number, it will cost you $40 and may take a month to transfer the number ( during which time the number might not work). My experience took a week and I received notifications through the process. However, you should set your expectations correctly.

B. do not transfer your existing number until you have the ooma working perfectly. Let the Ooma run for a week or two and play with it. If you try to switch your home phone number while the Ooma is having problems, you could set yourself up for a nightmare.

C. Unlimited calling means less than 5000 minutes per month. If you go over, they reserve the right to drop your service.

D. Don't connect ooma to a wifi network. Wifi sucks to begin with so you will probably get bad calls. Connect the ooma to your home network using a cable.
E. Pay attention to how you plug the Ooma into your home network. For the simplest success, plug the Ooma into your cable modem and your home router into the ooma. If you decide to plug the ooma into your home router, make sure you don't pick a port linked to the uplink port and haven't made custom settings on your home router that might cause the ooma to have communication problems.

F. don't plug in the ooma until after you have went to the website an set it up. There is a simple to follow guide in the Ooma box that explains these steps but I can only imagine how many people don't follow it.

G. after unboxing and plugging in ooma, it could take an hour or two for the ooma box to set itself up and the ooma light to turn blue and ready to go. So, plug it in, walk away, and come back later.

H. There will be a call quality decrease. There are too many variables to tell whether the call quality will be acceptable to you, so don't ask. 

I. If you don't have a good Internet connection (6mb or more) you may have unacceptable quality problems.

J. If you type something wrong into the website during configuration, you will have problems. So, pay attention. For example, if you are moving your phone number and you don't type your phone number correctly, or, don't provide a copy of your bill for troubleshooting - you are going to have problems.

K. Do your best to do self service. I haven't had to contact the Ooma support, but most people who have contacted Ooma support for help are the ones who report the worse Ooma experience. I recommend doing everything you can before needing to call for help.

I hope these suggestions help make your Ooma experience a good one!

Cutting Cable part 6

I am cutting my cable bill from $250 to as low as I can get it without significant sacrifices. So far I have cut $70 per month by fighting for a discount and by replacing one of my two phone lines with Ooma.

Next? I am going to cut at last $42 per month more by cutting the second phone line. I can run both phone lines  through one Ooma, however, the second Ooma goes to an attached Inlaw apartment. Therefore, I want them to have their own separate phone line. That means two ooma.

I had a great experience with the first ooma and had no problem switching my phone number to it. I ordered the second ooma, set it up, and tested it. The installation was flawless (because I properly set my expectations and installed it properly). 

My next step is to move the Inlaw phone number to the ooma. Then, I will be able to drop the second phone line from the bill and save another $42 per month!

Tune back soon and watch my progress as I cut the cable.

Cutting Cable Part 5

The second Ooma is on order. I expect it to arrive any day now!

I don't need two ooma for two phone numbers. But, I have an Inlaw apartment and it will be easier if I have two of them. This way my phone won't ring if it is for them (and vice versa). 

Cutting Cable Part 4

My Time Warner cable bill is $250 and my plan is to cut the bill heavily. So far I have went to Time Warner to negotiate a better rate, and I have dropped one of my two telephone lines by installing Ooma.

The bill arrived today and was only $146! Part of that was because they prorated a discount for last month. My bill will normally be $183 (including the taxes)

Next step? Another ooma for the second line and I will save $44. I could run two lines on my single ooma, but I don't want to.

Then I will return the cable boxes and save $14.

With the phone service off my cable modem, I will be able to replace it with my own cable modem and save $8.

That should get my bill cut from the original $250 to $120. And then I can start looking at cutting the cable TV back.

Stay tuned and read about my journey in cutting cable! 

Driveway Repair

You might recall that in 2014 we had our driveway re-stoned. Unfortunately, the dump truck dropped off mostly dirt, not stone. And as warmed temperatures have melted the snow, parts of the driveway are turning into a mud hole!

Patching a paved driveway can be difficult - especially when the temperature is 38 degrees. But patching a stone driveway is easy! $40 worth of pea gravel took care of the problem.

I didn't patch the entire driveway, but I patched the worse of it. In another 5 or 6 weeks the rest of the driveway will dry out and be fine.

Chinese Drywall

Buyer Be Ware!

When I first heard about this problem I thought it was a joke. But make no mistake, this is not a joke!

After 2001, and during the housing boom, cheap drywall was imported from China. The drywall emits sulfur under humid conditions. those sulfur emissions corrodes copper and makes people sick and is throughout Florida. Houses that have sit empty for a year without air conditioning to control the home humidity could be very bad. The corroding can turn the copper electrical wiring to dust, ruin plumbing, damage refrigerators and appliances, and break air conditioners. Remediation requires, basically, gutting the house to its studs and starting over.

There are regulations for remediating Chinese Drywall, but many contractors will do just the minimum and will not do a complete job - like not replacing the electrical wiring.

The only way to be sure is to have the home inspected for Chinese Drywall or Chinese drywall damage before buying the house.

Cutting cable

Time Warner gave me a $61 discount that allowed me to keep my cable boxes. Nevertheless, I haven't hooked the cable boxes back up. I want to see what life would be like without cable boxes, and without any channels above 100. So far the only thing we have missed is the clock on the front of the cable box. We became conditioned to look at the cable boxes to see what time it was - and now that is gone! Other than a clock, we haven't missed the cable boxes.

The discount bought me some time while I continue to replace our telephone service with Ooma and investigate satellite TV.

Cutting Cable: getting a discount

This is Part 2 in my Cutting Cable adventure. My Time Warner bill is $250 per month. My plan is to cut the bill.

Over the weekend I called Time Warner and asked for a discount. I was told there are no promotional deals available for me. The problem was that I was talking to someone over the phone. I wasn't standing at the counter with my cable boxes telling them to cut my channel subscription.

Well, that is what I did today. I fully intended to return the cable boxes and drop my channels to 1 through 100 - something that would have save around $45 per month.

Amazingly, today I qualified for a promotional discount! Not only will my cable bill drop $61 per month, but I get it prorated so that my next bill will an additional $34 cheaper.

How about that?

Of course, this doesn't stop my plans of cutting the cable. I am continuing with plans to drop the phone service, followed by getting rid of the Internet modem rental, and then so will look at satellite offers to see if I can find something to beat cable.

Cutting Cable

My Time Warner cable bill is $250 per month. For that, I get Internet, TV, and two telephone lines. That seems like a lot of money to me, so, I am taking actions to cut my bill. I will chronicle my activities in this blog.

I called Time Warner and asked them to reduce my bill. They said they couldn't. That's OK because I am going to reduce it myself! Cable companies made their fortunes being monopolies, but today they aren't needed at all!

My first step was to order a Ooma telephone device for $110 at Amazon. Someday I will write a blog for how to have a good Ooma experience. So far my experience has been excellent. I plugged the ooma into my Internet, plugged a phone into ooma, did a little bit of web site configuring, and was done.

I pay over $70 per month for two telephone lines. With Ooma, all I pay are the taxes - $3.50 per month.

Today, I issued the request to have my home phone number switched to Ooma. The request cost $40. It can take a month for the request to process.

Once the request is finished, I will be able to drop one phone line from my cable service. I have $150 invested in the ooma. I figure I will break even in five months. After five months I will be saving $32 per month!

If this is ooma is successful, I will order a second ooma for the second line. You can run a second line to one ooma if you want. But my second line goes to an Inlaw apartment, so, they will need their own device. Once both Ooma are installed I will have knocked $70 per month from my bill!

I am looking forward to cutting my cable bill. Right now it is $250 so I am going to keep chipping away at it until I can get it as cheap as possible!