Charter Thoughts

About the Charter offering for our communities, here are my thoughts and some "findings:"

The connection from one of those light green columns to your house will be coax, similar to the wiring used for Dish or DirecTV.  So the installers will have to route the coax to some place in your house where they can connect the existing satellite inside coax to their run from the outside.  In my case, the satellite coax connection is outside right next to the phone and power boxes, near the ground, so this is not a problem.  It could get complicated if the satellite provider ran the coax from a roof-mounted antenna to someplace deep in your house, without an external ground level connection.

The price for the first year for TV/Phone/Internet is, for me, about 1/3 of what I am paying now. Your savings might be greater.

According to our representative, the modem model Charter provides is the Cisco DPC3216:  outputs are 2 phone jacks, one ethernet jack.  So you can plug your wireless phone base station directly into the modem.  This modem is included in the wifi bill; you don't pay for it like you do for a wifi router.

The router/wifi they provide is supposed to be the Netgear AC1750.  This is a $117 router and is very good.  I don't have an opinion on renting vs buying.  I have another router I will use.

My wife is concerned about the DVR.  She records a lot of live news-oriented shows.   She doesn't like commercials.  I understand that the current DirecTV DVR is technically far superior to the one that will be offered by Charter.   On the other hand, as mentioned in the meeting we had recently, you will have access and the technical capability to download and stream real time a number of programs that you currently record on the DVR.  The question will be:  how do I get around the commercials?  OR are there no commercials?  I hope someone can help me out on this by commenting below on whether or not it is easy to get around the commercials. (Update:  some streaming shows include commercials.  And it is interesting that the providers of the show have a way that prevents you from "fast-forwarding" over the commercials.  There is another solution that involves setting up your own DVR using an old computer.  And I bet there is a way to use your current computer to record the program as it streams and then play it back on your big screen.  But that is too technical for everyone.)

Looking through all the On-Demand offerings, I found that most of the shows I watch I can get "on-demand."  I do have a question about the various PBS offerings, since we watch a lot of the PBS series, both drama and documentary.  The issue will always be:  will we miss programs because the DVR can only record one program at a time and it only has a capacity of about 500 G?  (2G/program hour)  I don't think it is an issue, especially since PBS runs most programs multiple times during the week.  But you might be skeptical.

Finally, we have about a hundred shows stored on the DVR now.  Will we ever get to all of them?  Probably not.  But as soon as we switch over, all those recorded shows will be lost, unless I can find a way to transfer them to my PC.  My wife is not happy.  Oh well.