Cord cutting

I would like to scrap my land line, cable TV and internet. Is it feasible to use a cell phone’s mobile hot spot to access the internet and stream video, surf the web,etc. Anyone doing it successfully?

1. Only cut your landline phone and cable line. Keep your internet line.

That’s about it.

With a mobile hotspot, you won’t get a constant speed, limited range a lot of the time, very strict data limits, high latency, etc.

I agree about keeping the internet. I work from home a few days a week and couldn’t get by without a fast steady connection.

I use rokus on all my TVs. Hated paying to “rent” cable boxes.
I added an HD antenna in the attic and a tablo box to get local channels to the rokus, laptops, and tablets in the house. (the siliconedust offerings are a little nicer, had I needed to do it again).
I run a plex server for movies and downloaded content.

It’s a bit different and took my wife some getting used to. She had channels she’d watch or certain shows. When everything is on demand the TV watching experience is a bit different.

For instance, turning on HBO or whatever, and watching a movie you kinda like, even though it had already started. Pretty normal passing the time type of occurrence for me before. Now, i’m less likely to watch that same movie, as you kinda commit to watching it if you play it from your server, or netflix, prime, sling, etc.

We’re a couple years into it at this point. I don’t miss the mindless channel surfing or the endless advertisements one bit. My daughter, a little over 2 now, will never know what it was like, which I think is cool.

It is technically possible to use a mobile hotspot for all your internet needs, but they make it difficult with limits and throttling, and also overage fees.

Agree with BlueSwordM, If you can get a decent price on broadband (cable modem usually) then get rid of everything else in the house.

Might not exactly answer your question but here is how I lower my expenses. I got rid of my home phone service and cable and bumped up my internet. My setup:

  • Tablo 4-Tuner OTA DVR It is quite possible to get many channels, even HD, depending upon your area for free. (best with an external antenna) You can check for OTA channels here Things have slowly been changing. ATSC 3.0 Essentially you need the internet with the new standard. Instead of watching what you want without someone knowing what and when you are watching, you will get targeted adds and every flick of the channel will be recorded. Goes to a larger issue about data about most everything we look at is being collected. A bit creepy and big brother but it has become the world we live. It went from irrational paranoia, that someone was watching you years ago. To an ability for people to collect information about you. To now computer system collecting your data and spitting out statistics about your buying habits, what gets you out of the house and what keeps you in and so on.
  • WD Elements 8TB USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive WDBWLG0080HBK-NESN Black (This DVR needs a lot of storage)
  • OBitalk 202 (connects to a central headset, which then connects to wireless headset, for the house) I kept my home phone # by jumping through few hoops. It is a little more technical but I might of tried a dedicate IP phone to start with.
  • Use” Anveo”:https://www.anveo.com/enter.asp for phone service (A PA company)

Not a plug and play solution and a large up front cost but I’ve been doing this successfully for over a year now. At much less of an expense. All the equipment has payed for itself by now considering what I save not buying all three services. There are also some useful things you could do with this setup as well. If your interested please PM for a Anveo referral number and some tips. It doesn’t raise your cost it just give me credit off my build.

We use a DSL phone line for internet. We get up to 10 - 12 Mbps on a good day, often less but we are at the maximum distance. Cable not available. We use cell data only when away from home or if the DSL goes down; our DSL is quite reliable though. We chew through data too fast to make it affordable on a cell plan.

Being on a mountain we are lucky with broadcast TV. We can pull in several broadcast network channels with a large antenna with a rotator. We use Netflix with success over the DSL.

If my DSL were that fast I would keep it. Mine is 3mbps or less . Cable wants $56 for 25 mbps plus install fee of $55 plus modem/router rental of $6/mo. (1TB cap). That is why I asked if the cellphone hot spot is a option. Also, I am in a mountainous area where a roof top antenna will only get me a few weak stations, thus the need for streaming.

I’ve streamed from my plex server to my phone tethered to a laptop. While it works, it uses a ton of data.

1080p came through with minimal buffering at the beginning and none while playing.

I use an app called pdanet+, which circumvents my provider’s block on tethering. I don’t use it but once in a while though, as I prefer to keep my cell service.

If it’s less than what you’re currently paying for landline, TV, and internet, then it may still be worth considering.

You can typically avoid the $6/month modem rental fee by buying your own.

Like others noted, if you try to stream TV/video using your mobile connection, you will blow through your allowable monthly data cap in no time.

Yep.

If you lived in Europe, mobile plans would be much cheaper, since the oligopolies here prevent good competition.

But then again, in most of Europe, Internet plans are much cheaper too.

A lot of great information here.

I kept the lowest level internet that Comcast offers, replaced the landline phone with the Magic Jack and got a Roku stick for the TV. Magic Jack is about $45 per year.

We already had Amazon Prime and Netflix for programming.

I am doing a month trial of Hulu to have access to network programming.

I still don’t have a good solution for local programming. Every indoor antennae that I tried only gets a portion of the OTA channels available without having to adjust it all the time. A real big pain. So, my access to local news and to Public TV is pretty unreliable.

Is an outdoor/roof antenna an option?

Some internet streaming services such as Sling TV offer local channels, but availability varies by location.

I'm doing it, but only because it's my only choice. Cable doesn't come out to my house and I'm too far from a landline hub to use affordable dsl for internet.

Using Verizon. Data is capped at think at 12Gb. So streaming TV/movies/etc is not viable. Unused data carries over to next month, but that hardly every happens. Bandwidth throttles to an unbelievably slow rate once cap is exceeded. When I say slow, I mean I would rather used a phone modem if I had a landline.

The provided hotspot (Verizon MiFi Jetpack 4G) has a pretty sorry Wifi coverage. So I have it tethered via USB cable to a real wifi router. Works pretty well that way. Also added external antenna to the Jetpack with greatly improved cellular connection strength.

We have an antenna on our roof for OTA TV that feeds a 4 way distribution amp which supplies direct antenna signals to the TVs and to a HDHomeRun Quattro. Then I have a Synology DS1817 with 6x 8TB drives connected to a Netgear 10gbe switch which feeds Plex server. I chose to run my Plex server on my desktop so I can more easily upgrade the server hardware without messing with the NAS hardware.

Getting the HDHomeRun DVR working was a pain but now it records the shows we like and then I remove the commercials and transcode to HEVC using Avidemux and the Nvidia HEVC encoder running on a Quadro P2000. This is a surprisingly fast process since the GPU can encode at just ludicrous speed.

You don’t NEED 10gbe for Plex server but it makes adding items to the library and general maintenance REALLY fast.

Back when, my friend who lives in the middle of nowhere, used a Cradlepoint router that a USB 4g LTE modem could plug directly into for his home’s internet/wifi. Recently, I checked to see if these things still existed and it looked like Cradlepoint discontinued them but I’m sure they can probably still be found on ebay if you wanted to go that route. One of the best things he did was running a piece of coax from the modem to a yagi antenna he mounted on his roof and aimed at the nearest cell tower. He was on a truely unlimited plan and Verizon HATED him. :smiley: A few years ago, he ran coax down his road (a few miles) and switched to cable/cablemodem.

Yeah, I don’t need a landline nor cable teevee. About the only thing I need reliably is Duh Innernet, so that’s the only “service” (if you can call it that) which I have left. Cellphone coverage is okay, so I’m leaving that.

NYC used to be the delivery service capitol of the world.
Ice, rags, ice cream, milk, bread, seafood, pizza, coal, heating oil, Helms creampuffs, chimney-sweeps, TV repairmen.
What do they all do now?

All that are looking for local over the air HD TV have a look here to see what you can get in your area.

If you need an antenna have a look here.

Ditched my cable and phone line 10 years ago and never looked back, now using the original cable companys line to get my internet from another provider at 1/2 the price.

I have been using youtubeTV and been happy with what it has to offer.

We just cut the cord on cable a couple of weeks ago. I got an Amazon firestick and a friend recommended me a website that’s been very helpful with all the instructions I’ve needed. I’ve kept Netflix and Hulu and now get live TV through Area 51 for $7 a month. (PM me if you’d like more info as I’m not sure if I’m permitted to post the website here — even though it’s free). We’ve been really happy with it thus far. We kept Internet and now we’re exploring if we want a faster connection because it appears to work better with firestick too.

I have been reading about Area 51 since you brought it up. I am getting mixed reviews whether it is legit or not. What is your take?