I cancelled my landline with Comcast today. I’ve been thinking about it for some time and — since I have a cell phone anyway — there was little reason to keep the landline. Really, what kept me from cutting it off even sooner was DirecTV. Since it needs a landline (for DirecTiVo especially), I hesitated to cancel the landline and lose that option.
It didn’t help that Comcast Phone offered no means of auto-payment each month nor any means of online payment (sure, Comcast Internet Access has both of those, but it seems that two subdivisions may as well be separate companies). I mean, if they had auto-payment that billed my credit card for the $24 each month, I probably could have put up with that. Compared to paying online, I’d rather not have to go through the effort of writing a check and licking a stamp each month.
The final straw was their recent form letter about an upcoming 19% price increase on residential service (up two dollars). Well, forget that. Of course, DirecTV would be a bit of tougher option now ;). But, my primary interest there was just for HBO (since it’s not available in my area without moving to digital cable). And, Mike has a Netflix subscription so we can probably get most of the good shows (Sopranos et al) on DVD through there.
We haven’t had a land line for two years. you can update Tivo via the ethernet port connected to your router, and you can update DirectTV via the satellite dish.
Right, I’m already updating my TiVo via a USB WiFi adapter. However, I don’t believe that DirecTiVos yet support WiFi connections :-/.
If you have cable-based DirectTV, the only functionality you’d miss out on is the ability to order pay-per-view – which is no big deal to us.