Modems, cable, and streaming, oh my! The Trials and Tribulations of Cutting the Cord.

My obsessive compulsiveness often shows through with my acumen with spreadsheets.  In other words, I itemize, sum, box, highlight, and average probably (a lot) more than a normal person.  Last night my typically mellow husband barked repeatedly for me to get off the laptop's spreadsheet and go to bed.  Ultimately I did, only to pick it right up again in the AM.  :)

However, this particular weirdness has its benefits when trying to weigh the costs and benefits of cutting the cable cord.  As I've said in an earlier post, I am actively pursuing getting rid of my costly cable for television viewing and replacing it with streaming as well as purchasing a modem rather than renting it.  I've been really busy lately and unable to follow through.  Wait no more, I've picked up the cause again with a vengeance and in the process even became sort of an expert in modems.

We've hit a couple of stumbling blocks.  Most modems do NOT come with a phone jack and none of the approved Time Warner Cable (TWC) modems on their website had a phone jack.  As of now, we want to keep getting our phone service from TWC.  However, that means that we need a modem with a phone jack.  I've been told that there is an FCC rule that says we cannot be charged for modem usage if it's for a telephone.  That is not the case for cable television.  To whit, I am subsequently charged a monthly fee of $8 (which adds up to a whopping $96 each and every year--until they raise it again!!).  After lots of searching on-line forums and websites, in a last ditch effort I called TWC.  (I tried the on-line chat, but that was just canned responses, and was not that helpful.)  Once I finally got a human being, the customer service rep was actually very helpful.  She said we can purchase an additional modem for the internet and replace the current one that is rented for a phone-only modem.  Problem solved!! (She also gave us a short list of approved (but not on the website) list of modems that have a phone jack.  However, they were waaaay expensive and not at all worth it.)

Here's a brief summary of the cutting the cord costs and benefits:  (There's lots more spreadsheets, but I'll spare you--for now.)

TWC:			Ours:			Estimated Savings:
TWC Monthly Cable Costs w/Modem			Hardware/Streaming			Monthly Savings Year 1			Monthly Savings Year 2
$74.73	Cable		$19.80	amortized p/month			$40.93		$60.73
$7.00	est. tax/fees		$29.00	aprox. 2 streaming services p/mo.
$8.00	modem		$48.80	total p/month		Annual Savings Year 1			Annual Savings Year 2
$89.73	per month		$585.57	total p/year			491.16		728.76
$1,076.76	Cable Costs per year

Long story short, I'll be saving a butt load the first year (about $500), and even a bigger butt load the second year (well over $700!!).  (The second year, for the purposes of my analysis, I've considered the one-time purchases of hardware, to be paid in full in one year.  This is because most hardware warranties are only one year though some of them are two years, and it's a relatively low cost.  The second year is just the monthly rental costs of streaming, which we haven't decided which way we will go, so it's just a guess.)

More details of what we purchased, will purchase, why, and how much, to be detailed in a future posting!!

An cord cutters out there????