I held out on a home phone for a while -- mostly because I had grand illusions of playing around with Asterisk for a home PBX, and needed something to connect it to. But I cancelled that probably 8 years ago, when I finally accepted that I don't really like talking to people on a phone anyway -- regardless how interesting the underlying technology may be.

Satellite TV went about four years ago. The only thing that changed is the billing, really, since now we pay our cable bill to Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. At least it's a little more flexible, although from time to time I shake my head at how shoddy the experience can be at any arbitrary moment -- like getting locked out when travelling abroad, or just dumb website design and the tendency to default to jumping right into something else as soon as the ending theme song starts. I guess most people just don't have any attention span, but I like to reflect for a moment on what I just saw before getting distracted by the next bright shiny image.

What I'm really concerned about is how this shift in distribution plays out long-term. I don't mind having three providers, but it kinda sucks losing access to certain shows because their network decided they want to start their OWN streaming service now. I'm just not going to subscribe to fifteen content producers independently. Just no. Maybe someday it will all coalesce again, and we'll be right back to cable TV but with a new name. More than anything, I just don't trust content providers and their constant bickering and concern above all else with rights and ownership. I've got way too much beloved media (music, books, games, movies) that now exist in a legal no-man's land and would be inaccessible if I didn't have a tangible copy that can't be withdrawn by a random board meeting. I suppose I will just have to get used to missing out on things. Maybe that's healthy anyway.

Mobile Internet is definitely getting remarkably good these days. Just spent a couple weeks on the other side of the pond, and unlike last time I left home, where I was locked into a contract with my domestic provider, I got to buy a holiday SIM card and enjoy 8GB of data anywhere. It really makes navigating and paying fares and discovering new places so much easier. IME, the cell providers usually do a better job of assuring quality service than local hospitality WiFi -- which is often next to useless, if not completely. I still don't see how it can completely take over for wired Internet service (to include extension to private WiFi hotspots) since the air is a shared medium. If we all used it exclusively, it would be saturated beyond usability at low frequencies, and dependent on a ton of ultra short-range infrastructure at higher frequencies, so either way not ideal. That said, LTE is capable of minor miracles and 5G is only supposed to up the ante. We'll see I guess. I once worried about how we were supposed to get more than 56Kb/sec over a copper phone line, and that has been solved to an extent I couldn't have even imagined back then, so I presume it'll all work out.

I hate "talking on the phone" too. I would happily ditch my phone & carry around a wifi tablet all the time if there were a convenient way to send text messages over the internet (and have them appear on the recipient's phone as a normal SMS coming from "my" "number".)

Anyone know a non-sleazy way to do this? I can make Google Voice calls to the regular phone network all day long, but sending texts seemingly means going to the digital equivalent of an alley behind the strip club.

Cyberdyne wrote:

Well in Estonia we do not really need any WiFi, my mobile dataplan provides me 50GB domestically, and plus 5GB over entire europe for just 7EUR a month, plus i have limitless phone calls and SMS. Last phone had a faulty WiFi and Bluetooth chip, i did not even care, only sometime i coud not provide a hotspot.

I pay $36 (CAD) a month for 500 MEGABYTES of mobile data and I get 100 voice "minutes" because apparently that's still a thing. This is the absolute best deal I could get at the time (2015ish, maybe it's time to shop around again.)

Fortunately my home internet is legit unlimited, but it's basically as fast as what I had in the '90s (7Mbit down/768k up.)

This is what happens when everyone who lives in a certain geographical area (okay, fine, "country") has never lived anywhere else, and only compares their level of services to the immediate southern neighboring geographic area, and does impressive mental gymnastics to convince themselves what they have is superior by default even when it's demonstrably not. Companies eat that up and it's bilk city. Moving back to this continent was a RUDE awakening.

SirNickity wrote:

What I'm really concerned about is how this shift in distribution plays out long-term. I don't mind having three providers, but it kinda sucks losing access to certain shows because their network decided they want to start their OWN streaming service now.

I think eventually that power struggle will play out. Nobody wants to miss out on an opportunity to have a bigger piece of the streaming pie, but there is a limit on how many services we are all willing to subscribe to for exclusive content. My guess is that it will move down to less than five major players within the next ten years. Otherwise showtime will start their own streaming service for 10$ a month, and consumers will just not watch the show. Can't have a revenue model based on "I'm not paying extra for that, go fuck yourself" 🤣

My guess is that Disney, despite being late to the party, will end up with the lion's share before long. Given that they own basically every IP at this point.

Intel486dx33 wrote:

I would like to know how many of you have disconnected your mobile phone, cable TV, and home internet service. […]
Show full quote

I would like to know how many of you have disconnected your mobile phone, cable TV, and home internet service.

It appears that WiFi access is everywhere today. In stores, shopping malls, restaurants, coffee shops, libraries, etc.

Personally, I hardly ever use the phone and shutter at the thought of it.
There is nothing really that I would like to watch on cable tv.

On line movie service like Netflix, Amazon prime, and Apple TV channels, is what I watch most.

Some things I do to secure my privacy and identity:

- I don't use American social media like fb (and their subsidiaries like whatsapp and instagram) and google privately
- I don't use an Android or iOS phone
- I browse the interwebz 95% of the time with a VPN
- I take everything, really everything I watch on tv with a grain of salt. Everything can be fake or full of lies these days. I don't watch tv that often anymore.
- I don't pay 'contact free' at the shopping mall
- I will never drive a Tesla car

xjas wrote:

Fortunately my home internet is legit unlimited, but it's basically as fast as what I had in the '90s (7Mbit down/768k up.)

In which country do you live? That's really slow by today's standards. I've heard that in Germany and the U.S. lots of people still have such slow connections. Update: you pay in CAD so obviously you are from Canada 😊

I suspect the profit margins for Canadian telecoms are borderline obscene.

xjas wrote:

Fortunately my home internet is legit unlimited, but it's basically as fast as what I had in the '90s (7Mbit down/768k up.)

East and Central Europe had no Internet in the '90s.
Dial up appeared at the end and you paid for every single minute.

I think a lot of Canada has the same problem my particular geographic region has -- lots of land, not very dense population. That makes The Last Mile a relatively expensive proposition, without the possibility of recouping those costs by volume. Still, 7x0.7 is pretty sad. That was probably common here 10 years ago. Outside the metropolis, it ranges from sparse rural to leagues of wilderness in every direction. Some areas have satellite Internet at very low throughput, and it's so expensive that only the federal government can afford to pay for it. One of those such communities just got fiber landed in their village by happenstance (needed a place to regen along the coast every now and then) and it literally changes the way of life there.

^^ To make it worse, I'm on an island & a lot of people here seem to hate anything modern or anything associated with 'the mainland', so there's no real incentive to upgrade infrastructure when you can just charge people more to use the same old crap.

Just to clarify, you can get WAY faster internet here, but you pay through the nose for it. I'm in an old building and my apartment isn't wired for cable, so I'm using a "retro"-style DSL line; I could have had a much faster cable modem connection for roughly the same fee per month even from my current ISP (who are actually great), but it would've been hundreds up front and a whole mess of back-and-forth with my landlord to get it wired in. (I guess cable modems are outdated these days too, but that's what you get in a building that was built in the '50s, in a town full of people who were conceived in the '40s.)

7Mbit down is fine for my use; it's enough for 1080p content (just barely). The 768k upload sucks though, uploading anything hoses all my bandwidth and makes even simple surfing painful until it's done. It's why I don't stream on twitch.

The town I lived in as a kid was one of the 'test sites' for rolling out broadband, so my family got it way early (like, 1997??), and they were continuously upgrading the service back then. I remember downloading from alt.binaries groups and hitting 500~700kBytes per second at the very end of the '90s. I was so impressed I took screenshots. That's what my current connection taps out at, so I was being more-or-less literal.

I used to work at an ISP that went all-in on DSL as a carrier for data, voice, and TV. I was really impressed with what it could do at the time, but the problem, from a growth standpoint, was how asymmetric it was. The ADSL standards only allocated a tiny bit of bandwidth for the upload channel, so even as the tech improved and the download channel got larger, the upload was still pretty meager. I'm sure that has changed in more recent standards, since it's kind of an arbitrary partition in whatever spectrum is available over a long copper line, but it seemed to be an issue all the way up until I moved on to the commercial space.

Now cable... I wouldn't say it's outdated quite yet. 😀 Coax infrastructure is actually fairly capable, as long as it's even remotely modern (and, as such, is built for two-way communication -- a limiting factor back in the earlier days.) It's not quite fiber, but you can cram a LOT of data over coax, especially where the coax isn't terminated at a central head-end, but distributed out at the neighborhood via high-bandwidth backhauls. I'm not really sure what my service plan is actually rated for these days since it just works and is fast enough that it's not drawing any attention to itself, but I know you CAN order 1Gb (down) service. For residential Internet, that's still pretty amazing to me.