I’ve joined the 21st century. Our house is totally cable-free.
My husband never wanted to subscribe to cable television, so, to our children’s consternation, we never did.
We had a landline phone in our old house, but abandoned that when we moved to this house. We now only have cell phones, though there is a Bluetooth system with handsets around the house to make it easier to answer calls.
In our current house, we had a cable Internet service from one of the major providers in our area (a provider I shall not name). Inside the house, their device was connected both to Ethernet cables in the house walls and to a wireless router.
But I recently got mad at this service provider for two reasons. The first reason I got mad was that I had difficulty getting outage credit, despite a lengthy service outage.
This provider had an increasing number of outages in our area over the past six months or so. After a recent storm, our Internet was out for three days. I checked several times a day. Each time I checked, I received a text message saying we were still in an outage area. Then, after the crisis passed and they restored connectivity, they told me the outage had been less than four hours, so they would not give me a credit.
I set up an appointment at their local store, printed out copies of all the texts I had, and was prepared to fight for my credit. When I arrived for my appointment, I was told, “Sorry, we can’t deal with outage credits in the store. Here’s a toll-free number to call.”
So, I called the toll-free number. A nice lady immediately approved my credit for $5.31 (the small amount was about what I expected—but it’s the principle of the thing).
The second reason I got mad at my Internet service provider is that they ratcheted up their rates beyond a competitive level. Shortly before the outage credit issue, I received a letter stating that my monthly bill would be going up from $54.95 to $84.95. That seemed pretty steep, and much higher than all the junk mail and emailed offers I’ve been receiving.
As a result, when I was handling my outage credit with the nice lady on the phone, I told her $84.95 was higher than what other Internet service providers had offered me. “Is there anything you can do to lower my rate?” I asked.
“Sorry,” she told me. “You’re already getting $20 per month credit for being a long-term customer. I can’t do anything more.”
So, the next day, I went to Verizon, which offered me 5G Wireless Home Internet for $35/month because we have our cell phone service with Verizon. The salesman assured me that their 5G service could handle my entire home. “My parents live in your neighborhood, and they use it. Just put the router near a window, and it’ll do fine.” I bought the service and walked out of the store with a new router.
I took the router home and plugged it in near a window in the center of our house. Within a few minutes, I could connect my devices to our new home network. The only trouble was setting up all the computers, tablets, printers, phones, televisions, and Alexa devices on the network. (I think I still have one printer to go.) Our new password is easy to remember (for us), but hard to type, particularly on the point and click systems on devices without keyboards. Therefore, switching the network took a bit of time, but that’s a one-time thing.
It works great. We’ve been able to use multiple devices at the same time with no lag in speed. We’ve streamed videos with no pixelating. We have better connectivity than with our old Internet cable and accompanying Ethernet wires and wireless network.
Two days after installing the Verizon Home Internet, I called the old provider to cancel their service. Then I got the upsell. “I can offer you service for $44.95 a month,” the retention specialist told me. (Why didn’t they offer me a retention specialist when I called about the outage? I probably would have remained with the old service for $44.95/month.)
“No,” I said. “You had your opportunity to retain me as a customer. I was told you couldn’t do anything for me. And I’ve already installed your competitor’s product. I’m not going back.”
I listened to him add on perks, and I kept saying no. It took longer to get my old service cancelled than to install my new Verizon Home Internet network.
All was copacetic for a week or so. Then I came home one day, and my husband told me, “The Internet’s out.”
I sighed. Time for the IT technician in our house (me) to get to work. I rebooted the Verizon router and checked their outage map. Nothing. I wondered if I had made a bad decision to switch to the wireless home internet.
But after a little more investigation, I discovered one of my husband’s care providers had pulled the plug to the router so she could use that outlet. I plugged the router back in, and miraculously service returned. Verizon’s technology hadn’t caused the problem—human error had.
So now we have no wires connecting us to the world outside our home (well, other than electricity). We have antenna television and streaming services. We have cell phones. We have 5G wireless home Internet. I’m told we could hook the Verizon Home Internet to the Ethernet cables in our walls, but there’s no need to. We have entered a brave new world.
Where are you in adopting wireless technology?
