50 unreachable mofoz.

working online the blackberry allows me more freedom since i can check things on the go. it was pretty cool to be bidding on domains on the top of a (small) mountain. i do agree that cable is a waste of money and landlines are too expensive, well so are cellphones..check this, i pay
80-90 for a landline each month
95 for cable
50 for internet
64 for my blackberry
45 for my usb internet stick.

it all adds up and sucks but beyond the movies channels on the cable, i can't see getting rid of the rest.

Yeah that's funny.

Ya know what's even funnier?

People that think no business was ever conducted until the smartphone was invented.

If you like movies cut your cable and get a Roku or one of the similar streaming devices for your netfilx account. I got one recently and it's pretty much all I watch now. After you pay for the device you only need a 9 dollar a month unlimited downloads 1 dvd account on netflix to watch as much as you want. Bestbuy also has some new TV/DVR device you can buy and get most channels for 5 bucks a month or tons of channels for 20 a month, haven't tried that though.

$0 for cable
$70 for 5mbps internet and "home phone" internet phone w/ all the voicemail and fixin's
$80 for my man's Blackberry plan

Does the same, n'est pas?

wow, how'd u get bb for $64/month? mine was 2x that.

pretty much. here is what i want to do
reduce the cable to basic, that will be 45 instead of 95

lose the bell landland and get rogers home phone (does the rogers home phone work when the power goes out?) that will be 34-40 instead of 80-90.

see if i can teather my blackberry to my laptop and possibly lose the internet stick, though im not sure if the speeds would be the same.

well the price depends on your plan but with my girlfriends corp plan i get 250 minutes, 1000 weekend/evenings, 10 cents long distance, 250 text messages and voicemail as well as 1gig of internet usage for that price. i have no idea how much it would normally cost someone.

i see.

mine was the cheapest bb plan avail via verizon. :Oh crap

Every night i watch TV and ask myself the same damn questions :(

I'm a news junkie... I can't cut off satellite until there's a better alternative to refreshing websites all day. News, Food, Discovery, History, and Military Channel stuff. The rest can go.

No, the "home phone" is through the internet, so when the power is out, your router is dead. I guess if you had a UPS, it might still work?

I am shocked at the amount of people with no cell phone. I couldn't imagine an entire day without my cellular device.

I have a simple call phone, it's not smart and does not connect to the net. No TV. I read books and use the internet. When I'm away from my computer I do not want to get email or chat. Life is simple.

I honestly can't think of a single "bad" thing I use my iPhone for.. unless you want to call talking on the phone bad.. in many ways it helps me, like:

1. I can't sleep at night time, but if I play some music from my phone it always helps me to sleep. And it will stop playing after the album is done so it's not on all night long.
2. I have the TED talks app installed and sometimes I'll watch the latest ~20 min video while laying down and usually feel tired by the end of it, or even fall asleep in the middle if it's a boring lecture. They say sleeping directly after learning something is the best way to store it in memory so this one is definitely a good one.
3. I have like ADD or something and I am constantly thinking of questions to Google, my phone makes that very simple and fast. Sure they're sometimes stupid questions, but I'm usually not doing anything worthwhile at the time anyways.
4. I like to sometimes look up word definitions, I simply open the phones browser and type "define: word" and it shows definitions.
5. Sometimes when I'm driving I'll need to quickly find the nearest [X] place, which is very fast and easy.

How is this bad exactly? What else would I be doing during these?

I don't play any games on it, even though I have a bunch, because they get boring 20 minutes after I install them.

i don't recall saying that you using your smartphone is bad. or anyone saying so, for that matter.

I don't pay much for my landline as it's bundled w/ TV and internet via AT&T U-Verse. Part of the reason I keep it is because I am home a lot and like having a cell phone but don't want to have to fork out a lot for a ridiculous plan, and as it is I don't (and don't have a smart phone - ditched that months ago).

It'd be tempting to tone down the TV...right now, I get premium channels really for the occasional movies on their On Demand channels and for 1 whopping show: Dexter. Having said that, I had some other plan before where I was getting more channels and honestly don't think I ever watched a single one of them, so downgraded that.

One thing I'd advise everyone to do periodically, especially if you get a bundle of services through someone, is call them. I have never NOT gotten additional discounts when I've called AT&T up to make changes to my account. Even if they're just discounts for only a 6 month period or something, it's better than nothing. The last time, I had quadrupled my net speed and was going to downgrade my premiums but they talked me into keeping it w/ a discount, and I was actually paying $5 LESS per month after the call with only UPGRADES for 6 months, then $5 more per month after. The net upgrade was like $15/mo above what I had before...if I had done it online like I was going to originally, that's what I'd have been paying more for it.

just got off the phone canceling my account with directtv when it expires july 12, they said thank you very much. no attempt to offer any deals or save a customer who's spent a shit ton of $ with them.

good riddance.

I got rid of my TV many years ago, not because of expenses, jush didn't wanted to trash my mind anymore...

I'm not sure if I could scrap the tv yet..... although I did go pretty much without tv from 1987 to 1999. After I finally stopped living on the road and got tv in '99, I was lost... had no idea what shows were the good ones, which ones sucked... had never even heard of Fox. I guess I could go without it again and not miss it much.... my wife could not though.

When I bought my new TV at Best Buy I went and got the directTV deal with it because they had a killer deal for a year and I wanted the HD which my cable provider couldn't deliver at the time.

My first mistake was giving directTV my CC# so they could get their money each month.

When Direct came out to install the dish it turned out I couldn't receive HD signals because this huge tree was in the way of the only place they could put the dish so I was going to have to go to a regular dish which meant they would have to redo the work order and send someone out later.

Another guy came out and got a regular dish working fine. When they changed the work order they also changed the price because I was no longer eligible for the Best Buy deal because that was for only the HD dish. Now I'm paying more for directTV for the same channels that I was getting from my old cable guy PLUS I was locked into a 2 year contract. That was my second mistake.

I hated the Dish because it lost the signal every time it rained hard here in Florida and that's almost every day in the summer.

Finally, my cable company was able to put out HD and I was able to switch back to them and get HD plus internet for $103 a month compared to Direct's $120 just for regular signals and the basic channels package. I did have to pay an early cancellation fee which I always knew about.

So I call to cancel my service which they promptly do with little fight. They said they will send out a box to return the receiver in which seems fine. What they didn't tell me but is in the contract is they deducted the price of the receiver from my CC ( $320 or something ). It just appears on my statement so I call. They say that the money will be refunded back into my account when the receiver is returned to them. I say fine but I only cancelled a few days ago and you haven't sent me a box yet. They said tuff, that's just the way we do it and it's in the contract which I didn't look at because I signed up at the counter at Best Buy over the phone when I bought my TV.

So it takes them over a month to send the return box. I pack it up and send it back FedX the same day. Two weeks go by and no refund so I call again and they say the receiver was received at some place where they check the condition of it before the refund. I ask how long that takes and they say they have up to 90 days to return the money.

So for the month it took them to send a return box and 3 months to refund the money they held my $320 that they took out four days after I cancelled my account. The whole thing was a big nightmare and I eventually put it behind me instead of letting it eat me up.

They still send me letters every month a year later to try and get me to come back.

Good riddance :)

that's insane!

it does remind me of when they installed my dish at my condo. we could not attach the dish to the building so needed the platform base. they would not say how much that costs, so dude comes out and eyeballs everything and says $150- CASH only, paid to him right then, right there. fine wtf ever.

then as he's rigging up the service, he asks me to smoke him out, saying he smelled some buds.

umm, no. you did smell buds and they aren't for you.

get yourself a $50 prepaid cell phone and just use it to make phone calls; that's what they were intended to do in the first place, anyway! If you want to surf the net, use your computer. Then again, that's what it is meant to do!

A la Carte cable sounds great in theory, but there are variables to consider. If you tell the cable company you only want channels a, b, and c...what if something pops up on channel x, y, or z and you don't have any of those? I have the Food network, but I still like to know I have that and other channels that I might watch if something grabs my interest.

Of course, there's always just having the character to not give a shit what's on TV...but I can't do that. There's too much good stuff on.

We have a Cell phone and its about 47$ a month with internet access that we rarely use. we have the land line for DSL and VOIP. that's about 200 a month and then we have satellite for another 50 or so and that's it. But the TV is for my son and we rarely watch it.

You're right. That's just insane :)

I live in a condo and we can't attach to the building either so my only option is somewhere on my porch which was blocked from the HD satellite signal by a huge tree. They did however install the regular dish on a metal stand secured to the floor for no extra charge as it was part of the normal installation.

Sounds like you got worked :upsidedow

Dam that DirectTV

right move, smart decision

drat, that's what i meant to write, that's justinsane! lolz, not enough coffee yet..

and yeah, i did get worked, but i always do, i guess i'm the guy that pays for all those getting the discounts everybody else gets! hell, even when my internet goes down and i call about it, they offer to pro-rate it for the exact time it was down, like $1.27 kinda thing. then try to pitch me on upgrading to a bundle or something.

I wouldn't call it character, just a difference, but I 99% fall in the "don't give a shit what is on TV" category.

They could address your issues by simply showing a full guide of scheduled programming, and if you saw something upcoming that you wanted to watch, you could buy it on demand, just like you can a movie.