10 Things Cable Companies Won’t Say - None of these are news to me and number 5 is the scary one. We’ve been waiting for years for cable Internet service but I’m not sure it would necessarily be a good thing if they did finally offer it as promised. (They’ve been saying that it will be available in a few months or within a year for nearly 10 years.)
We keep sticking with cable TV for a couple of reasons. One is that our satellite Internet connection usually doesn’t work in bad weather and I expect that satellite TV would be the same. Around here you really need TV during bad weather. The other reason is, as mentioned above, we keep hoping they will eventually offer Internet service. Another reason - and I suppose this is trivial - is that I don’t want two satellite dishes on my roof. Also, I hate the idea of a contract.
We are fairly satisfied with our cable service but there are a few things that we really don’t like about it. The worst is paying for channels we don’t watch and not getting some we really want. (See number 3 on the list) Another thing is that while it doesn’t seem to be affected very much by weather (with the obvious exception of downed cables due to wind or ice) it occasionally quits for no apparent reason. On the positive side, the customer service is not bad at all. Whenever we call with a problem so far they’ve sent someone out within a day or two and he has always arrived at the time they said he would.
I suppose I should feel lucky to have any kind of “high speed” Internet service out here but for some reason I think there should be something better available. We are in a rural area, over 10 miles from the nearest town, but it is a highly populated rural area. It’s actually a lot like any small town or suburban neighborhood except that instead of houses being on half acre or smaller lots they’re on three to over a hundred acres and they don’t all look alike. We have county water and cable TV so it’s past time we had real high speed Internet. Satellite is faster than dial-up but still not fast enough and there are bandwidth restrictions so we have to limit our downloading and video watching somewhat. Generally, I watch all the YouTube videos I want but I wouldn’t dare try to watch whole TV shows online. That I can watch any videos at all is an improvement over dial-up but many websites are just as slow or even slower over satellite.
I guess in the early 20th century rural people were just as impatient to get electricity and telephones but really! They have wireless Internet in remote villages in Africa. Why can’t I get it in Oklahoma no more than an hour away from Tulsa?
August 10th, 2009 - 8:21 pm
The city where I used to live in Connecticut was one of the first in the country to be fully wired for cable, back in the late 1960’s I believe. Rumor has it that the city government arranged for the cable service at the behest of baseball fans. While the majority of the people in the city who liked baseball followed the Yankees, there were a substantial number of Red Sox fans (not many people liked the Mets, for some reason), and the latter group complained that in most parts of town they could not get the Red Sox games on Channel 38 out of Boston even as the Yankees fans had no trouble picking up their team’s games on Channel 11 from New York. Allegedly, the city government struck up a deal with a company to wire the whole town for cable, just to silence the complaints of the Red Sox fans. The cable system carried only one channel out of Boston, and yes, it was Channel 38
August 16th, 2009 - 7:52 pm
“One is that our satellite Internet connection usually doesn’t work in bad weather and I expect that satellite TV would be the same.”
You are absolutely correct about that. We tried satellite for about a year & went back to cable after one too many incidents of having reception blocked by a random cloud.