For a very long time we’ve been talking about cutting the cord on cable at our house. Our Cox Cable bill was totaling $297 per month ($3,564 a year!) for a bundle of services that included cable TV, HBO, land line phone and internet. That’s a huge amount of money to shell out every month, and we knew we would benefit financially from cutting the cord on cable. And we did – our bill is now $65 per month.
We saved $2,784 a year by finding great alternatives – that’s a savings of $232 per month! Before you get too excited, know that you may still have to work with your local cable company as your Internet Service Provider. That is, until Google gets their cable laid anyway.
Apple TV comes with SIRI, and you can use voice commands to find a program you want to watch.Still, we are really happy with where we ended up. We dropped our land line telephone service, since all four of us exclusively use our mobile phones anyway.
Cutting the Cord on Cable
Here’s how we did it:
- Apple TV 4K – The latest version of the Apple TV product has all the necessary HDR features for us to watch with the greatest picture clarity you we’ve ever seen. Plus the SIRI remote it comes with is so handy, and we can verbally ask it to find us a particular movie or show. LOVE. IT.
- Cable Modem – Buy a cable modem so you don’t have to rent it from your cable provider. We chose the Arris Surfboard with up to 10+ Gbps download speeds (that translates to really fast streaming).
We purchased our own cable modem so we wouldn’t need to rent one from Cox. - WIFI – Apple is discontinuing their AirPort product that previously delivered WIFI, which was just okay anyway. About a year ago, we switched to the EERO wifi router because it provides a consistently strong signal throughout our entire house. With 4-6 users at any one time, we hear wails of discontent if the wifi isn’t operating at top streaming functionality. EERO has consistently delivered.
The EERO system enables WIFI to reach every corner of our house equally – no dead zones! - (Hint: Here’s a little test to see how fast your wifi really is. Type fast.com into your browser, and the screen that appears will show you the speed of information your ISP. Anything above 15 mbps is considered good. Our is 98 thanks to EERO).
- Content providers – We already had Netflix and Amazon Prime accounts, and hardly ever watched cable TV except for awards show, major breaking TV news and the Olympics. We also signed up for YouTube TV, which basically solves that problem.
Our Apple TV screen allows us a range of viewing choices, all in HDR. - KODI – KODI TV is an open source entertainment hub, bringing you pretty much whatever you want to watch whenever you want to watch it.
NO CABLE AND SO HAPPY
Now we can all blissfully watch whatever we want! Well, Triton and I can – the girls have to earn their TV time with good attitudes, clean rooms and high grades. We’ll see how this goes…
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Thank you so much! My husband keeps asking if we should cut the cord and I haven’t had the mental bandwidth to go figure this out. I think I’m going to print this blog and use it as a check list. Thanks, Jon!
I’m so glad you found this helpful Kelly! Tell your husband we’re really happy we did this and have not looked back once. Good luck!
Most of the people are switching to Netflix by cutting their cable cord but it is a fact that anyone can make their entertainment better if having both the services.
Probably true Nathan – for us it was a budget decision!