Vonage For Teh Win AND How To Get Cheaper Cable!

So me and the family recently moved to a condo. With this condo came a condo association. When we moved, we had direct TV for satellite television. However, the condo association did not allow the dish to either get strapped down to the side of the house or put it on a pole in the front of the house. It would be in the way of the landscapers if it were on a pole. It turned out to be ok, because that let us out of our direct TV contract and let us get this for our TV needs. This media adapter allows me to beam whatever the hell is on my computer right to my TV without wires between the two. It's freaking awesome!

My wife, however, did not like the idea of having to wait to watch whatever she wanted to watch. She did not want to wait until it was available from the internet, she wanted to be able to watch whatever whenever. Well, we managed to come to a compromise. We got the $250 media adapter and got the antenna service from comcast. No, this service is not some antenna sitting on top of your roof. the service is just called that. there is still a cable from comcast running to the house with the service on it. the service just has the local channels, like 2-25 or something.

and that leads me on how to get cheaper cable. I was on the phone with comcast and wanted some prices. Their site is not that good on just giving you the gist of things. So the lady is offering me this $33 each plan where you get voip, internet and cable from comcast for $33 each. I'm sure you have heard of the deal. I said that i did not want that, i already have vonage and internet. So then she throws some "basic cable" package at me. All i wanted to know was the price, so i asked how much. She said $50. I said "too much, whats cheaper." The very next priced package down from "basic" at $50 is Antenna at $10...TEN!! How do you go from 50 to 10?! I have no idea, but that sure as hell was in my price range. And, get this, since i only had the internet before i was paying $60 a month for that. Now that i have another service from comcast my internet service went down to $40!

So, lets calm down and take a recap of everything thats going on here. I had internet for $60. I managed to beat out the cheapest TV package for $10 and then my cable service went down to $40. I think that deserves a woot!

And thats how to get cheaper cable. The vonage part of the title comes in when i was talking to the lady about getting cheaper packages and she starts to talk about comcast's voip service. i told her that i already have vonage. Then, she starts feeding me some bull story about how comcast's voip isn't like the other ones and how it comes through a separate line. Long story short, it was bull. Voip is voip. what i wanted was for me to be able to download a lot of stuff and not have it eat up my bandwidth and mess up my phone calls. This comcast rep was telling me that the voip comes to my house in a completely sepperate line and will not effect the service of voip or internet at all. BULL! But, just to double check and make sure that it was too good to be true, i called back later and spoke to another person. If i got voip from comcast it would be set up the exact same way i have everything set up now. The only way to get around that is to have a router with quality of service settings. I managed to get my linksys router flashed with a different rom, following this procedure, which added some QOS settings. I'm pretty new to the whole QOS, but i did manage to figure it out for programs running on my computer. Just not the router...yet.

And thats it. I got cheap ass cable, a bit cheaper internet, vonage still and a media adapter that will pay for itself in a little bit over 4 months since i did not get the $70 digital cable package.

Also, i did do a previous post on the goodness of vonage. Feel free to give it a read. It was so good that it was even featured in Voip Central! My offer still stands, by the way. First 2 months are free if I use the refer a friend deal for on you. Just leave me with your email address and I'll shoot you an invite to vonage.