Cutting the Dish

We have a lot of change ahead of us in the coming 6 months, and being (ahem) unemployed one consideration is to minimize our fixed monthly expenses. High on my priority target list was our home landline phone and Dish Network subscription.

First, I want to say how much I love Dish. The Hopper service is amazing, and their liberal concurrent use policy has allowed Jacob to take advantage of my subscription and stream (for example) Red Zone from his apartment in Pittsburgh. That's all done now.

This week I severed everything but the Internet service from Frontier. And apparently I had some legacy Fios bandwidth agreement so I had to rejigger that as well. Honestly it didn't matter -- I was a very early Fios subscriber and enjoyed phenomenal bandwidth for years. For the past year reality set in and I fell back to earth with typical 30-40mbs levels. My new plan supports 30M download and 5M upload.

Also, I didn't truly cut the cord yet -- I just paused the service for $5 per month. I still have a few months left on my 2 year commitment so this is sort of a separation, with a likely future divorce.

What am I giving up? Most of live network TV, unless I want to really try to make an HD antenna really work. I'm not sure that's terribly feasible here in Sherwood. The greatest loss will be ESPN, but football season is over and we won't be in town when college and NFL start again. I'll also miss Game of Thrones on HBO but I know Westeros will wait for me. Future binge watch after I finish Foyle's War in about three years.

I'm saving about $120 per month by dropping Dish and the landline. I've had a Netflix subscription for a long time so I don't view that as a replacement expense. All I've added on so far (as a replacement) is an $89 Roku (which I think for most scenarios is superior to AppleTV) and a Hulu Plus subscription at $7.99 per month. I still have my AppleTV 2 and a ChromeCast as backups.