Cutting the cord

I recently looked closely at our Verizon bill and discovered among the many fees we are paying for Internet, TV and our home phone, was more than $60 a month to rent those cable boxes that hook up to every TV.  This only covered the set-top boxes, not the actual tv channels or anything else.  23 years of paying that each month!  Stop the madness!  Our Verizon bill is ridiculously high and for the longest time I've wanted to do something about it.

I got inspired to start researching our options when one evening, Jeff said to me, with the kids away for so much of the summer, let's see if we can bring our FIOS tv channel package to the lowest one they offer and save a little money.  I replied back with, let's get rid of them altogether.  There has to be a more reasonable solution.  We have friends who have said goodbye to FIOS and cable many years ago.  But, they don't care about having live tv and is satisfied with streaming shows as they are posted.  The only way this was going to work for us is if we could still watch TV live as it aired.  We needed to have the same channels we had with FIOS.  It needed to be a mostly seamless process if we were going to give FIOS the boot.  We are family that LOVES our TV.

As for getting rid of our landline, I needed to find a company that would port our home number. This would only be successful if we kept the same phone number.  We briefly thought about getting rid of the landline altogether and only use our cell phones, but too many people have our home # and we still use it quite a bit.

I am happy to report that I was victorious with everything.  We've officially gotten rid of Verizon providing our services for our home phone and tv.  We still have them as our internet provider but only because I haven't found a better alternative.

Our landline is being provided thru Vonage, it's a VOIP (voice over internet protocol).  We still have the same phone number and all of the features that we had before (voicemail, caller ID, call forwarding).

I found a few different companies that offer live TV streaming through a Roku.  Our first attempt was with DirectvNow.  It had every channel we wanted.  However great the price was and the live tv channel offerings, it wasn't reliable and it didn't work more than it did work.  It was frustrating and Jeff was ready to stop this little experiment I was undertaking and keep paying the big bucks to Verizon for FIOS.  We took to calling it "DirectvNever" when speaking about how the transition was going.

Fortunately there are no contracts and it's a month to month arrangement.  I went back to the drawing board (in this case google) and found a different company.  YouTubeTV had all the local channels we wanted and the sports channels Jeff loves, but it was lacking the food and entertainment channels we needed.  So another quick search gave me the idea to try Philo.  Between the two streaming companies, we had every channel we needed.  And even better, these two Internet companies work!   The streaming is flawless and we can do everything we did with Verizon, including recording our shows and watching them later.

We've quickly adapted to our new set-up and the money we will be saving each month is pretty spectacular.  I love technology and love it even more when it works.