If it wasn’t for my HGTV addicted wife, I’d be rid of cable already. I admire the young folks who’ve got Hulu, Netflix, etc. tailored to what they want to see and haven’t developed the cable habit. Rugman says “That doesn’t sound crazy. When we had cable it was $10/mo for a DVR and $7/mo for an HD receiver. So we were spending $194/yr on two TVs. Not that TiVo was much better. $150/yr plus $350 up front for the equipment. It would have taken us eight years to break even.” “Consumers should not be forced to rent video boxes from their pay-TV provider in perpetuity,” said Markey. “In today’s competitive video marketplace, American consumers have a growing number of choices of video providers and ways to access video content on multiple devices in and out of the home,” said NCTA. “Retail devices including TiVo, Roku and Apple TV have been purchased by tens of millions of consumers.” It’s a rip. And when Hulu or Netflix or whatever starts playing live sports, I’ll switch. I’ve had a number of times where my internet will drop out, but not my TV. I’m on Comcast. My signal doesn’t go out often, but if anything goes out, it’s internet. TV might go out as well less than half the time. Depending on the cable co, they run their DOCSIS connections on different frequencies than most of the cable channels. The company I work for runs the command and control frequencies for the cable boxes at 42 and 75 mhz, internet at 585-655 mhz, and cable channels all over the place, but with most of the popular ones around 200-400 mhz. Higher frequencies are more susceptible to issues stemming from long cable runs, too many splitters, wet drop line, etc. I’ve been to many trouble calls where the internet doesn’t work but the customer thinks the cable is fine because the channels they watch are fine, meanwhile a significant number of those other channels can have poor or no reception. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when you rented your landline telephone. If it ceased working, the phone company had to come fix it. Yes, the Bell Monopoly, when you had no choice but to rent the phone they allowed you to use on their network. If you were lucky you could petition Bell to use your own telephone, but you had to pay a Bell technician to inspect and rewire the phone if they deemed it necessary, and then pay the technician to install the phone for you, and then Bell charged you a monthly fee to use your own phone that was greater than the cost of just renting a phone from them.