I have been trying to find the best way to get TV, internet and phone service at home. I started with comcast for cable and internet and Qwest for my phone service. Then got fed up with comcasts crazy pricing system. So I went for the whole package deal with Qwest. It’s been slightly better pricing but for some reason each month Qwest has a ton of hidden service charges. DirecTV sucks as in that it’s a totally locked down system. It’s a pain in the ass to get it to work with my Tivo. I went to all the trouble to get a USB to serial to Tivo serial (mini jack) connection to work and the DirecTV updated their system and broke the functionality.

The other thing that sucks about DirecTV is that all the channels are on east coast time. Sometimes its nice to have a program on earlier but for the most part I have no idea when anything is on. So I have to hope my Tivo got it before I got home from work.

So I finally got fed up with DirecTV today because they added some game service that totally busts the whole user experience. If you change to a game channel then you can’t change away. There is no way to do it without going back to the guide. They are making a terrible user environment. Their remote blows chunks too. It’s so bad that I bought a universal remote. My Tivo remote used to work fine.

The Qwest DSL has been a joke too. Their highest speed is 512 up and 1.5 down, but the best I get is about 128k up and 256k down. I have never seen it perform at full speed.

I picked up an LCD HDTV the other day and to add insult to DirecTV I found the over the air Digital TV (DTV) signal for HD to be a 1E + 48 times better. Oh and I’m using a small wire for my antenna. Thank you free excellent quality TV from the air. It actually seems like a pretty good set up. The signals are clean and the tv guide service works really well. What I don’t get is why there are like 5 religious channels when there are only about 13 total DTV channels available. I’m wondering if I can get my own DTV channel?

So I’m switching back to comcast and this time I’m switching everything to comcast.

I’m pretty close to getting rid of my landline phone. The “land line” will cease to exist but will be included in the comcast VOIP service. Which is one step closer to no longer being needed.

What I don’t get in all of this chaos of poor customer service is that there are basically two options for me to choose from. Why isn’t there more competition?

When will internet TV be good enough for me to unplug this crap they call cable broadcast TV?