TW Cable

[JohnT]

I just received an offer to bundle all three services--TV, Internet, Phone--with Time Warner Cable for about 60 percent of the cost of what I already have (ATT phone & DSL, and Dish Network). Do any of you use these three services? What has your experience been with them?

[pepper52]

Excellent service on all three.

[Cope]

I had Dish Network for 5-6 years, and a year or so ago I switched to TW for their lower price. it was a 1 year contract, and at the end the nearly doubled my rate. I called and they refused to give me a lower rate, even with a 1 or 2 year contract. I switched back to Dish and combined it with my already combined phone, long distance, DSL and cel phone. After I did this (for what I had been paying with TW) they wanted to offer a discount. In the time I was with Dish, my bill went up a total of $4-5.

Another problem with TW phone is that if the power goes out, so does your phone.

[JoeBannon]

I just have their cable and internet.

[babybluetx23]

I just have the cable and the internet. A friend of mine had the phone service a few years back and said it was terrible! I personally use Sunrocket Phone service. it is voice over IP so if your internet ever goes down for any reason, so does your phone service, but we carry cell phones here at the house, so if our phone service ever goes down or the internet, we just call the home phone voice over IP and set it up to forword to one of our cell phones. We pay $199.00 a year FLAT. You can call anywhere in the US and canada. We have never had any problems with the voice over IP other then if the internet goes down. That happened twice since we have lived here. Once when the power went out due to the storms, and once when the cable comapny subcontracted out some digging work and they HIT my cable line. it took them a few days to get us back up and running. luckily my neighbors let us mooch off their wireless to get on the internet. Phones were still down since it has to have a physical connection to the internet until the cable company got the internet line repaired.

[JamesB]

i have it all as well.

internet and TV are very stable, as long as the techs dont mess with the signal to fix a neighbors problem down the street.

we have not had any problems for a few months now.

phone service is ok. We have had more phone outages than anything. I dont use hte phone a whole lot, but my wife does, she will talk for about 5 to 6 hours long distance to her friend in Denver every few weeks and our bill never changes

the voice quality is no different than land line from AT&T/SBC

I also have the home security monitoring so I have the quad pack form Time Warner (soon to be comcastic)

James

[robert t]

Make sure you know if your VOIP service provides 911 with number and calling location. Some do not, some providers being taken to court over it. Some cell phone companies only provide the tower location your phone is connected to, those that provide GPS information are not as accurate as you might think, the GPS information does not give your exact location, best shot is four to six houses around you if in a house, on the road could be a large as a half mile radius. If the house is on fire that will not be an issue, follow the smoke, but for other emergency services it could delay a response long enough to get you seriously hurt or worse. You must be able to tell someone where you are. The number of calls we get from people saying send the police, fire or EMS and then they hang up is unbelievable. If your billing information is not where you are when you call, you might be stuck.

[babybluetx23]

Originally Posted by robert t

Make sure you know if your VOIP service provides 911 with number and calling location. Some do not, some providers being taken to court over it. Some cell phone companies only provide the tower location your phone is connected to, those that provide GPS information are not as accurate as you might think, the GPS information does not give your exact location, best shot is four to six houses around you if in a house, on the road could be a large as a half mile radius. If the house is on fire that will not be an issue, follow the smoke, but for other emergency services it could delay a response long enough to get you seriously hurt or worse. You must be able to tell someone where you are. The number of calls we get from people saying send the police, fire or EMS and then they hang up is unbelievable. If your billing information is not where you are when you call, you might be stuck.

VOIP Companies now BY LAW HAVE to provide you with the E911 services. If they are unable to do so, they can NOT offer you their services BY LAW. Now thats not to say that some off the wall, cheapo VOIP company cant slip one past ya. so it is a good thing Robert told ya!

[robert t]

There might be some shady ones still out there, takes time to nail them. The cell phones are the worse to deal with especially the ones that do not get any info, It's a sick feeling when you hear someone screaming for help and you can't do anything for them because they have no idea where they are and they think cause they called 911 you should know where they are.

[Graydon]

One thing I've noticed is that TW offers the same services in different areas at different prices... in Corpus I know the cable and internet prices are lower than in Houston.

As far as if the power goes out the phone goes out.. not 100% accurate. If the power goes out the phone goes out after the battery in the "cable" modem goes out.

I don't understand how it all works, but I can lose tv service but still have phone and internet. As far as overall reliability, it's been sufficient for us with only significant down times coming in the middle of large storms... where I'm not prone to be on the computer anyways.

Last thought... intro rates tend to vary significantly from long term rates... so make sure you got that one figured out.

[babybluetx23]

Thats also an Idea. If you get VOIP you can get a Battery Backup Unit that can hold the router and the Phone Device for X amount of time. i never really thought of that for my services here at the house since I have never really had a power issue other then last week when the power kept flickering on and off. It only went down for a matter of seconds, but It would take down the router and the phone device long enough that I had to keep resetting them to get them back up and running. Either way, I may eventually get a BBU for backup purposes. if we ever loose power long enough we actually have a generator that was my Father In laws. When he passed away we inherited it. it is a welder/generator that we can pigtail in to the main breaker panel in the house to keep the house running on electricity.
I know that Verizon Fios has the same thing. They have a BBU to keep the phone connection alive for a little over 4 hours if the power goes out.

[JamesB]

Originally Posted by Graydon

I don't understand how it all works, but I can lose tv service but still have phone and internet. As far as overall reliability, it's been sufficient for us with only significant down times coming in the middle of large storms... where I'm not prone to be on the computer anyways.

Basically its black magic....

if you lose one but not all services, its gonna be a gizmo gone wacky with that service.

this may not be correct so some one correct me if im wrong on this....

the cable company sends out cable TV pulses or packets as well as phone and internet, each in a specific order or code.

the cable modem at your house breaks out and inputs the pulses, signals or packets in their correct "place" on the coax cable that makes it all work

your basic tv can decipher the basic cable tv signals. if you have a cable box for premium channels, the cable box is what decodes the signals in their correct order to make it work.

your phone from the cable company is the same thing, its just another signal on the line.

i very recently read that in a few years cable companies will be able to provide the same capacities as fiber. so even though things are heating up with phone companies providing internet, TV and phone, cable companies will soon have the same capacity as fiber.

James

[babybluetx23]

It is different frequencies that the services run on. Good example is Verizon Fios.....Sorry i use that as an example but it is the only one I REALLY know since I worked there for 2 years.......Voice, Data, and video. They run on three different spectrums of light. just because ONE goes down it doesnt mean they will ALL go down. Another example is with FIOS there is a battery back up. If the power goes down and the battery kicks in, it is designed to shut down the data and the video and reserve the battery power for the phone only. There could also be an issue with the "Gizmo" as James calls it. With FIOS there is a box on the side of the home called the ONT. The data port could cause a problem to where you can not connect to the internet but you still have video and telephone. It could also be a router back in the network somewhere that could cause the network to be down or there could be a phone switch down in the network that doesnt cause an issue with video or data. One last example is the customers computer. there could be a problem with the customers computer that doesnt allow them to connect to the internet but there isnt actually anything wrong with the network or any of the "gizmos" in the system. ect ect. there are several reasons that one service could go down but others could still sustain.

[raevyncent]

I had tv/net by Charter Cable, I highly recommend them to be drawn and quartered, then tarred and feathered and rode out of town on a rail. I had VoIP through Lingo (still do) and they required that you provide a physical location on an official 911 notification form. Anyways, just like Cynthia, I love my VoIP and could forward to any phone if the net was down. Unfortunately, my cable net service was so unreliable, we had to keep the phone forwarded to cell for a solid 2 1/2 months, costing us upwards of $500+ in cell bills. Needless to say , I never paid my last bill from them, and they have not persued it, as I have enough proof to show in court that they owe ME for the cell bills as a direct result of their inability to provide adequate service.

I now have ATT/Dish, but as soon as I can will switch to the new ATT U-Verse fiber optic phone/TV/DSL bundle.... the most telecomm for your money as far as I have seen. Tons of HD too!

Anthony

[JohnT]

Thanks, everyone. I've decided to pass and just keep what I have for now. Hopefully, I can move into an area in a couple of years that has FiOS.