As I mentioned in Part 1 (Cutting the cord – Part 1 – Internet), there are five main areas for people looking to “cut the cord”: internet, TV, home phone, cellular phone and website hosting. Of all of them, the one that people are the most bothered by but least likely to do anything about is the home phone.
I grew up with Bell. And I was a long-time victim, err, customer of Bellopoly. I had some perverse pleasure when my wife (then girlfriend) and I moved in together as it meant only paying Bell once between us. One of those cost savings that you actually are gleeful about, in a strange way.
When the CRTC forced Bell to deregulate some of their offerings, other companies popped up to offer home phone service but the prices weren’t that much better and it wasn’t a strong incentive to switch. People relied on their home phone, an essential service you needed to work, and not something you messed with…you paid Bell their monthly extortion, and you grumbled, but you didn’t do anything about it.
Then cell service exploded. Lots and lots of people have ditched their landlines completely, only having cell phones. Mainly the under-30 age bracket, but not exclusively. Just as payphones have followed the dodo out the door, landlines are no longer “must-have” essential services for everyone. Lots of households have multiple cell phones, and with the explosion of smartphones, most of them have them with them everywhere they go. Less chance of leaving your old-style flip phone in the console of your car, or not having it close by.
So when people have “cut the cord”, they have been more likely of late to just cut the landline entirely and go all cellular, all the time. I don’t know that it is a viable solution for us. I am not a huge cell user, honestly. If I have or make 10 calls a month, it’s high. For my wife and I it is mainly about convenience when one of us is out (me) and the other (wife) wants something to be picked up. Or I call from the grocery store and say, “Hey, you put x on the list, did you want 500 ml or a litre?”. Or more often, “You put x on the list…what the **** is x and / or where in the store would I find it?”. I also have a mental blank when I think, “So, whose cell would we put as the number for dealing with our internet, probably me?”. Silly, as it makes no difference whatsoever, but I have some mild comfort from the fact there is a “common” line to reach either Andrea or I, even if we’re not there to answer directly. Also, I like the fact that if my cell phone rings when I’m at work, it’s guaranteed to be worth answering — so few people have it, if it rings, it’s likely my wife or my son’s school. If I start listing it for every business we deal with, I’ll get spam I really don’t want.
As a result, I’ve never really considered cancelling my home phone. I just left it with Bell for a long time, and then when Rogers took over all my other offerings a few years back during a move, I switched to Rogers Home Phone too. Didn’t hurt that I wasn’t sure if the phone lines in our new house were that reliable. They sure looked like cheap wiring. And I never had a problem with the Rogers setup. We have a wireless phone in the house that the base plugs into a jack, and the rest of the extensions connect to the base wirelessly. You only need one jack to work. Because I had Rogers internet, it meant I needed a separate wire setup so that the connection came out of the cable jack, split into phone and computer/internet and then there was the modem, router, computer daisy chain while the other line went back into the wall and wired the phone. All of it worked, no issues.
Well, one issue. The same as with Bell. We don’t use our home phone a lot, and it was running us between $30 and $50 per month over the last few years. I’d tweak the setup once in awhile to get the cost down, but it really was a drag on spending. My mom passed away 3 years ago, and I only call one sibling long distance…very rarely do I make phone calls, most of my comms with people are either in person or by email, facebook or occasional text. My wife uses the phone to talk to the parental units and her sister in town, plus a few other business related things, but her cell would likely work as well. Still we wanted the “common number”. We considered a complete ditch, but weren’t quite ready to pull the trigger.
Enter the VOIP…voice-over-internet-protocol. It’s the fancy way of saying that instead of Rogers Cable or Bell Telephone providing your phone service, you run the connection through the internet. Some think it is just like Skype, but not quite. First, it’s just a phone, no video connector. Second, Skype just runs on your smartphone or tablet or computer, whereas VOIP uses an actual phone for the hardware (usually). Third, there’s a company on the other end, just like Rogers and Bell, handling the connection for you. Not exactly like an “operator”, but close enough. What’s the attraction? You can keep your home phone number, you can use your existing phones, you buy a base unit that plugs into your router, and…drum roll please…it costs $3.95 a month. A tenth the cost of the landline and we still get most of the benefits of an actual landline through the virtual one.
Now, don’t get me wrong, there are reasons why you might not want to do it. First and foremost, it uses the internet. If you have a lousy internet connection, this might not be great for you. Second, there can be slight lags in your conversation. It’s not as crystal clear as your regular Bell line, and sometimes there can be a half-second delay when you’re chatting. I have a friend who was using it, liked it, didn’t find the lag egregious, so we gave it a try. My wife thinks it’s fine, barely notices it. Third, there is the “emergency” situation. Most of the stubborn people say, “Oh, I need a landline in case there’s an emergency.” And if you have VOIP and your power or even just your internet is out, you have no phone. Cue the backup cell phones that we already have, so not much of a concern. As well, if you have to phone 911, the computer won’t know automatically where you live, so you’ll have to give the operator the address. Just as if you were calling from a cell phone.
In the end, we went with Ooma. I’d like to say I checked out 5-10 great providers and this was the best, but really I went with it because a friend had it and liked it, with her husband being a decent geek who did a bunch of that type of research before me. The base unit ran me $125 or so at Best Buy. Setup was relatively easy. You plug it into your router, it connects to the internet, downloads all the latest firmware, and you walk through account setup on the computer. 20 minutes later or so, you’re good to go with a temporary Ooma number. You can keep that number if you want, or put in a request to port your old home phone number over. You can even run them simultaneously if you want to try it and see if you’re okay with it before ditching your other landline.
You might be thinking, “Sure, how much is long-distance though?”. How about free anywhere in Canada? There is a glitch with other long-distance — whereas Bell didn’t care how much you ran up the first time, they just billed you after the fact, Ooma is pay as you go. So if you want to phone elsewhere, you have to put money on your account. Mind you at less than a penny per minute to call the U.S., it’s not like you have to put a lot of cash on the account, but you do have to put a little. Just like buying a phone card for long-distance, entirely through your online account too.
We’ve had no issues so far, porting was super easy. They offer you a whole bunch of extra features in the first month to get you to upgrade to Ooma Premiere ($14.95 a month) and the features are sweet. Better voicemail. Forwarding to your cell phone easily and with some extra conditions. Copies of your voicemails sent to you by email. Notifications by text or email that someone has left you a message at home. Even the option to have the phone listed in any area code in the country (i.e. if you want it to look like a B.C. number, you can have it be a B.C. number even if you’re living in Chicoutimi!). Great options, and only an extra $11 a month. Still well under the $40 I was paying before, on average. Yet we didn’t need most of them. We have voicemail, we can access it remotely, that’s good enough.
$4 a month instead of $40. Instead of $500 this year, it will cost $175 with the hardware. After this year, it will drop to $50 a year, pretty much what I was paying monthly under the old system with taxes. Oh, and that $3.95 a month? That includes your 911 emergency access fee, so it isn’t even Ooma charging you the full $4.
Likely we’ll think of ditching the landline altogether, but for now, I’m willing to live with the cost/benefit ratio. And I’m okay with saving $325 this year alone, even accounting for the new hardware cost.
As I mentioned in Part 1 (Cutting the cord – Part 1 – Internet), the core focus of the “cutting the cord” movement is on reducing costs and unbundling things to make them as cheap as possible. There’s a strong element of “freedom” in there, not unlike writers going the self-publishing route, people growing their own food, running businesses out of their house through the power of the internet, ordering glasses over the internet, etc. A lot of it is thumbing the nose at the established monopolies to say, “Well that may be how you THINK we should do it, but I can do it myself now, and I don’t need you.”
Of the five main areas (internet, TV, phone, cellular and hosting), by far the biggest focus is on cable TV. As I mentioned in the previous blog, I’m not talking about people thumbing their noses at TV because they think it is rotting people’s brains or they didn’t watch it to begin with, it is about how you consume TV and whether you get it from a monopolistic provider or if you get it some other way that is (likely) cheaper.
While the current form of the movement has gone legit, the pressure points have been around for years, often with lots of illegal solutions. People who had regular cable could pay for “descrambler” boxes that would give them pay-TV stations for free. Or dishes with special boxes that unlocked other channels too. Even, for a while, people splitting their cable feed where it entered the house so they could run it to multiple spots in the house without paying an “outlet fee” to the cable company (mostly eliminated now, but it did happen). Some people had US satellite dishes with U.S. post office boxes for billing, even if they were living elsewhere. Some people split their cable off the neighbour’s feed, and split the cost (or maybe didn’t even tell the neighbour!). While some of the people were just cheapskates, almost all of the solutions were double-edged — they were both illegal and a chance to thumb your nose at the established companies who said “there’s only one way to get the service, take it or leave it.”
In more recent times, there have been huge internet developments and people now have at least seven ways to consume TV differently that doesn’t require them to have a cable package subscription.
First and foremost, there is the still-illegal option of torrents. Putting aside the risk of malware, putting aside the bit of extra technical know-how to get it up and running, and putting aside the need to have a computer, it’s still illegal. You are downloading content that you don’t own and don’t have the rights to view. Often with peer-to-peer client sharing tools, which is the fancy way of saying that it downloads fast to you because it is downloading from hundreds of people with copies — and once you have a copy, your server usually starts sharing it too. You’re not only downloading and possessing illegal copies, you’re distributing too. Yikers. So what’s the upside? Massive availability of the latest shows. Movies in theatres, latest EPs of the hottest shows, no waiting for your theatre or TV or country to launch the show locally. If it’s out there, someone pirated it and made it available. Have I used torrents? Sure. Often when I missed an episode because my PVR didn’t tape. If I couldn’t find it online for watching through the cable offerings, it was out there on the net. But it’s not a long-term viable solution for daily TV consumption, at least not for most people. Too much overhead and tech, plus that whole (relatively minor) risk of going-to-jail-thing kind of turns them off. And no live sports. Ever. Usually not even taped sports.
Second, people turn to the easiest replacement for cable TV — services like VMedia (that some have somewhat incorrectly described as a Canadian TIVO equivalent, but I won’t quibble). It basically is the same as cable TV through cable or phone or dish, but it’s through the internet. There aren’t a lot of companies offering this service because, well, quite frankly it’s not a lot cheaper than regular TV costs. Add in the need for internet with a strong reliable connection, and some people are like, “Wait, I have to pay for VMedia AND for internet? Isn’t this supposed to SAVE me money?”. But the beauty of the VMedia-like service is that (a) it’s legal, (b) you get to keep your handy little TV guide and remote to page through current listings), (c) you get SPORTS with LIVE shows, and (d) you can add in a PVR option. It’s almost identical to your cable options, just works a bit different. A friend of mine has VMedia and it was a very strong contender for me when I was looking for a new option. Partly because it had the basic “menu” of shows to go through, a very easy transition both for me and my wife+son. But only marginally cheaper than what I had and, at the time, it had a very big LOSS — there was no easy PVR option. I was using my PVR for everything. If Castle was on Monday at 10:00, and I was watching TV, I wouldn’t watch it live. I’d wait until at least part-way through the hour and then watch it on PVR so I could skip commercials. Or I would watch something else and watch Castle later. I find it horrendously difficult watching live TV. One night I was watching, and there were 14 commercials in the middle of a special TV show. I really can’t take those long commercial break anymore — PVRing has ruined me for regular TV watching. Except sports, on that I seem to be okay, partly as the breaks aren’t usually for as long. So I ruled out VMedia last year for the lack of PVR option, and when I went to cut the cord this year, I re-considered it as an option as it now has a PVR option, but I was already committed to another (much cheaper) option.
Third, some people consider running something like Graboid. It is frequently described as being totally legal, that you can download all these shows for free, no risk. It’s totally untrue. Graboid is really just a torrent application that pulls from torrent sites and downloads the content to your computer. It isn’t legal, although it is slightly more legal than the raw torrent option as you don’t do any filesharing yourself and it usually doesn’t tell you where it’s pulling it from. A legal slight of hand, but not enough to make it legal. You can pay them $20 a month for better access (unlimited downloads, etc.), and some people think, “Well, I paid, so it’s all good.” No, you just paid them to let you download more stolen content than previously. It’s slicker than a torrent site, but it’s still not legal. I confess I fell for this one for awhile, they had a decent selection, and since I was only after TV shows, I didn’t notice anything strange. Then I happened to look at the movie offerings. And discovered that they had some of the movies that were STILL IN THEATRES. Here’s a red flag for you — if any site is showing you something that is still in theatres, particularly if it is just recently released, you are well into the illegal world. And downloading that stuff is a really good way to attract the interest of the companies being ripped off. I cancelled my Graboid account shortly thereafter.
Fourth, there is one option that exploits a big giant grey area with respect to online resources. If I go to ThePirateBay and download the latest episode of Castle, a law was probably broken somehow. My local providers signed contracts to have exclusive rights for set amounts of time and paid for the privilege so that they could make the money back selling advertising. Here I am, bypassing them entirely, accessing unlicensed content and DOWNLOADING it. That point is important. By contrast, if I go to CTV.CA and pull the same episode off their site and STREAM it from them, no issue. It’s freely available, but they show me advertising with it. Interestingly, I can go to ABC.COM or NBC.COM or CBS.COM and try to get this week’s shows from them, and I’ll be blocked — if you’re not in the U.S., you’re blocked entirely. Enter live streaming through a program like KODI. It used to be called XBMC video player, and while I had looked at it, it held little interest for me. Too techie in the config, not very user-friendly, and quite frankly, I couldn’t get it to work hardly at all. Plus I had other video players, so why bother?
Well, the program improved and became a new product altogether — Kodi. It is slick, it has decent menus, it has a reliable code base, lots of online user supports, etc. And what does it do besides play music or local videos or show local photos? It streams from the internet. Give it a URL of an internet stream, more or less, and it will stream just fine. And therein lies the grey area — streaming isn’t illegal. You didn’t make a copy of anything. You didn’t download anything. You didn’t share anything. You just watched what someone else put on the net. And you didn’t pay them anything for it, they don’t even know who you are. Most jurisdictions have no legal block for this activity. You can watch it because YOU didn’t do anything illegal and nobody is profiting from it through payments or advertising. So Kodi users around the world have set up free feeds. Streams of U.S. websites that are streaming it for free already. Some are streaming from copies on their own servers. Thousands of options, you don’t see hardly any of it. Because you don’t care. There’s nothing illegal about it for you. Sure, maybe the person who is streaming it might be doing something legal, illegal, or quasi-legal in whatever jurisdiction they are in, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are no Canadian / American / European / Australian laws that say there is anything wrong with watching something someone else put on the net. You don’t possess it at any time, you don’t own it at any time, you don’t share it at any time, you just watch. And while it does require a bit of setup to get it working on your computer, once it is up and running, everything is available. TV shows. Movies (although again, lots of pirated material in there that shouldn’t be, and easy enough to avoid). You want to see episodes of Castle? Yep, they’re available. Not just the latest episodes, all eight seasons, including the latest from this past week. It is way more manual than a standard cable package, but I PVRed everything already — this is like the entire internet is my PVR. Sure, it buffers occasionally (hence the faster internet package).
Now, you might think, “Well, that’s okay for the basic user, but I’m a heavy consumer, it wouldn’t work for me.” I know you might think that because I thought that too. I’m a much heavier than average user (not just physically, hehehe). I treat premiere season like some people treat fantasy football. I rate shows, I pick ones to watch, I review them, I add or dump some. And I raise the average hours watched per week considerably. I love serialized story telling. I love revisiting the same characters from the week before in a new story. I’m the same way with books — I prefer series whenever possible, and I’ll binge read as much as I will binge watch. NetFlix, Crave TV, Shomi, are all options for me, and I consumed them too. Up until I got Kodi. And this is the best part. You can try Kodi without doing ANYTHING on your existing cable package. Leave it exactly as is and try Kodi with no need to commit to ending anything or starting anything. It’s just a program to run on your computer. Like it? Keep it. Don’t like it? Don’t keep it. No risk at all.
I tried it over the summer, a few shows here and there. I basically wanted to evaluate it before I got to the fall premiere season. Turned out, I wasn’t watching my PVR anymore. Shows were still taping, but I was just watching them online instead. I weaned myself off the cable provider teat over two months. I have a laptop in my basement, so it was easy to add to the configuration. Kodi is like having Netflix, except with almost every show that has ever been shown, AND with current TV episodes available too, not just previous seasons. So my basement config was good to go.
The first-floor TV however was a different kettle of fish. It is generally used by my son and wife, neither of whom consume a lot of TV, occasionally NetFlix or regular cable offerings, and are not that interested in figuring out how to work tech solutions to get to their shows. If I cut the cable, they would lose their feeds upstairs too. Was there an easy option for them? It turns out there was. There are Android TV boxes that are sold, including a decent option by MyGica. Rather than having to attach a Windows PC to the TV, like the laptop in the basement, I can hook up the Android TV box, basically a little mini-computer running Android just like a tablet or phone but with full internet ports, USB ports, HDMI ports, etc. And oh look, there are NetFlix apps, a Kodi app, you can run the browser if you want to surf, etc. Is it as easy as the previous cable option? No, not quite, but they can do 90% of what they had been doing with two clicks. My wife tried it and said, “Okay, this will work.”
So, why doesn’t everyone go for the Kodi option? Four reasons:
It’s more technical. You have to add some configurations, play with software setup, etc.
You lose the live programming menu. I wasn’t using it much anyway, but if you often find yourself watching whatever happens to be on right then, without caring what you are watching, simple consumption browsing isn’t quite as easy.
Grey area doesn’t mean white. Some people still worry about the legality of it. If you are, simple solution until the law becomes clear — run a VPN for $5 a month that hides your IP address. It is actually a good security practice ANYWAY, even if you aren’t doing streaming, i.e. highly recommended by most security advisors to protect your home computer from hackers and malware.
Sports. Live sports is really hard to get, particularly if you want local stuff.
Most of the people who consume sports say this is the silver bullet for them…they can’t get their hockey, football, soccer, etc. I’m not a huge sports watcher to begin with, but occasionally we watch a hockey game or football game. Or golf. Or a lot when the Olympics are on. My son, age 6, really likes hockey now and wants to watch the Canadiens play. I thought this would kill us, which would lead to one of the extra options below (OTA), but I ended up with a free NHL Gamecentre subscription this season because I have a big Rogers cell package. It even comes with, you guessed it, an ANDROID app that runs on the MyGICA box. Instant hockey. Plus I found a bunch of feeds in Kodi called the SportsDevil add on that has amazing sports feeds. Half the time I end up watching those rather than the official feeds, just easier and sometimes more stable. With no regional blackouts either.
Hockey? All the NHL games are there. American football? There. Including some of the ones that are only available with super sports packages that cost you $200 a year. Soccer? Are you kidding me? They have every league around the world, teams you have never even heard of at levels you may not have heard of either. Baseball? MLB absolutely. After that, it starts to get a bit spotty. NASCAR, most golf, volleyball, etc. Few feeds likely for your local provincial teams (junior hockey, etc.) but they were hard to come by on regular cable too. A few weeks ago I was in Lindsay, and my brother-in-law wanted to watch the Eagles game. None of the local sports bars had the game, it was available on super sports packages only, and they didn’t subscribe. Yet we could have watched it on my laptop — I could get the feed, but I was trying to run it through the McDonald’s wifi, and it was buffering like crazy. I did a bit better at a local coffee shop, but still spotty. If we could have found a good hotspot, we were golden. I’ve been pretty happy with the options, nothing has been unavailable yet when I went looking. A bit more manual, harder to find than just clicking on a channel on your cable box, but doable.
Fifth, people decide to just ignore the current TV season. Instead, they subscribe for $10 a month to NetFlix, or less for Shomi or CraveTV, and get access to previous seasons of tons of TV shows and movies. All great options, but again, if you are like me, and you want the latest episodes, you need a stronger option.
Sixth, people go for “website” options. For this, you probably need the VPN option mentioned above. If you try to access ABC.COM, it will let you get all the way to the part where you play the video and then it will tell you the content is not available in your region. It knows you are connecting from Canada. So, no show for you. However, if you first connect to your VPN service ($5/mth), and it is based in the U.S. (most are), then the network website thinks YOU are in the U.S. too and plays the content just fine. If you can find it on a Cdn website, play it there; if not, go VPN, and watch it on the U.S. site. The downside is not everything is available, usually not for previous seasons, usually not for more than a few weeks, and often with ads with it. Plus you have to search multiple sites for multiple shows. It works, but it was too much work for me. Note that this is often no different than running Kodi — some of the feeds are the same source, it just tricks the computer into thinking you are already in the U.S., without the need for a VPN. However, the website option worked GREAT for recent election results — I watched the CBC website rather than the CBC stream through Kodi, just in the website browser (Android version upstairs, regular Firefox downstairs). The website feed was perfect. Which is likely what I’ll do for the Olympics too when it comes, just boot up the browser.
Seventh and finally, people go the OTA option. OTA stands for “over the air” and is basically reminiscent of the old rabbit ears setups people remember either from early TVs or setups they had at cottages, etc. While the fancy options now don’t look like simple rabbit ears, they work pretty much the same way. You wire it into the back of your TV or to a box and then to your TV, and the antenna pulls the feed from the air by tuning the receiver to whatever frequency the channel is being broadcast through the air. The options for this are pretty extensive, and the results are varied — depends on the variables.
First and foremost, this isn’t much of an option if you live in a rural area. Or rather, you may already be doing this, but you only get a channel or two. Large urban centres likely have multiple channels to choose from. Ottawa has up to about 15. All free over the air broadcasts, and since it is all digital now, pretty dang good quality signals to pull in. Not that snow you remember from the cottage, or attaching extra pieces of foil to extend the reception or trying to hold it at a specific angle. Second, it depends on if you live in a house or an apartment. If you are in a single level house, with a big antenna, you may not get great reception compared to the guy who lives in an apartment building downtown on the 20th floor with just a little antenna out the window and perfect sight lines. Third is the antenna itself. External / outdoor ones pull in better signals than internal / indoor ones, bigger is usually better than smaller, and the best yet is probably an external one hooked to a rotor that will let it turn the antenna for better reception depending on the channel you want.
Ottawa has two towers, one to the North-East, one to the South-West, and depending on which channel you want, you can get better reception pointing towards one of the two. You can get a better setup with a rotor so that if you choose Channel 1, and it is on the NE tower, the little machine tells the rotor to angle NE; if you choose Channel 2, and it’s on SW tower, it will rotate to the SW. Once it is set up, you never have to worry about it again, it moves on its own. Completely free. Completely legal. You end up with an antenna on your roof probably and some wires coming in, but the main constraint is the number of channels you get. Anywhere from 3 to 15 depending on where you live. I was considering doing this at home in order to get the local feeds, which would have been perfect for watching the news or the Olympics when it is on. Same with local hockey games. But with the GameCentre pack, plus Kodi, my wife has said they’re covered for now. I might do it in the future, and there are some cheap internal antenna solutions ($30) I could try first, before going to a full outdoor antenna with a rotor setup (about $350 for equipment and installation).
Why did I go Kodi? Because it wasn’t that complicated to set it up or run it once it was set up, the tutorials were dirt simple to follow, and oh yeah, it’s completely free. I’ll add a VPN soon for about $5 a month, which is pretty dang good considering I was paying Rogers $85 a month before. I had to shell out $200 for the MyGica box (there are cheaper options available, I went for faster processor, later version of Android, and more ports), and I added a wireless keyboard for the remote for $30 (purchased previously downstairs, but ended up not needing it down there). Bought a long HDMI cable too, $40. Overall, I’ll spend $300-$350 for the first year, compared to $1020 last year, and about $60 a year going forward.
Not too shabby a savings. For $700 saved in the first year, and $950 a year after that, I’ll put up with a bit more manual configuration and a couple of hours of tweaking the setup to be exactly what I want and use.
Most people have seen the headlines, advertisements, tweets, blogs all with a similar headline to mine — “Cutting the cord”. Generally it refers to people who have ditched cable TV. Unfortunately, every article comes with 500 comments that say “I cancelled cable, and I don’t regret it, I never watched TV anyway.” Congratulations, you cancelled something you weren’t using. How very strategic of you. Perhaps you can also cut off your head for the same reason. Once you get past the idiots, the next wave is the holier-than-thous who say, “No one should ever watch TV anytime, anyplace, anywhere, it’s all crap.” Again, they can join the idiots with cranial extraction. I have no time for either group, and neither have anything to do with what “cutting the cord” is all about.
The primary goal of “cutting the cord” is to be able to generally access whatever you want, whenever you want, without having to pay for things you don’t want. In other words, TV bundling. TV bundling is where Rogers or Bell or Shaw or LocalMonopolyProvider says, “Great, you can have TV, but you have to take these 30 channels where 15 of them are things you’ll never watch”, and charge you $30-$50 for the startup bundle. After that, you usually can’t do complete a la carte ordering of the rest of the channels you are interested in as often they are bundled too — such as “Speciality channel package 1” that will come with Bravo and Showcase, plus three others I’ll never watch for $5.00. If I take Bravo and Showcase separately, they’ll charge me, say, $3.00 each. So I take the bundle to save a $1 on buying them individually but then I start wondering about the business model. How can they charge me $3 each for five stations, how can they bundle all 5 and reduce it from $15 to $5? Easy. The other three stations are worthless to most subscribers. They’re the toys in the Extra Value meals at fast food places…most of them are worthless, interesting for about ten seconds and then your kid has moved on.
The CRTC has been pushed and are now pushing for TV providers to change their bundling options to reduce the initial bundle cost as well as reduce the overall cost of bigger bundles. In the meantime, a bunch of people have said, “Umm, you know you can find most shows online now, right? There are other ways to get the feed without paying bundled pricing to one company.”
And that is where the movement started. It has blossomed since then to be more about “what services are you paying for that you can get cheaper through third-party providers?”. In general, this comes down to five areas for most people — internet service itself, cable TV, home phone, cellular service, and if applicable, internet hosting. Let me talk about my experience.
Internet service
I live in Ottawa, and that pretty much meant up until a few years ago that you either went with Bell for phone internet or Rogers for cable internet. Lots of deregulation happened, and lots of little internet providers started cropping up to offer phone-based internet. I had Bell for awhile, and then switched to the National Capital Freenet. In theory, I could run NCF with a static IP address which would allow me to run my own server at home to host my personal website. I played with the setup a bit, ran some configs on a couple of Linux boxes, got things to the point where I could start playing with it. And then reality hit me. I had no real interest in running my own server! 🙂 Put differently, I have no support behind me. If I screw something up, I have no “better geek” to call to say, “I need this fixed asap, here’s my chequebook.” If it went down, it would be down until I figured out why and how to get it back up. I’m an okay geek, I can install routers, set up Windows, wire things from A to B, do some basic troubleshooting. But if WordPress suddenly crashes, I probably have no chance of finding where the problem lies if I can’t even get online and reset the setup. So I gave up sometime ago on running my own server setup. It’s just a layer of tech I’m not willing to take on. I’ll come back to internet hosting at the end, I just mention it in passing as I tried NCF for sometime.
Then, NCF started messing up, my connection wasn’t that stable, and I experienced what is frequently the challenge with third-party providers. Sure, they’re cheaper. Why? Because they don’t pay the overhead all of the big guys do. Like 24/7 extended support. Like people who can visit your house to fix the problem on short notice. They did the best they could, but it was looking like a wiring problem, something they can’t fix. Bell owns the phone wires, and did the wiring in the house. So eventually I bundled it back up, went back to Bell (they were providing my home phone and satellite service anyway), got it all resolved, etc. A few years later, I moved to a new house, hadn’t liked the Bell dish going out in bad weather or high winds, and switched to Rogers. Along with Rogers cable internet. Worked fine, rarely any issues, even in a house where I had to run some extra wires from the first floor router to the basement office (I really prefer not to go full wireless in the house for main computers if I can avoid it). Worked fine, and when I moved again, I moved everything to Rogers.
I have a small secret. One of the biggest complaints for any of the companies is that the Customer Service Reps are frequently horrible for tier 1, first level support. Just as I was about to move, a Rogers agent called me to ask if I wanted home monitoring — I didn’t, but while she was calling anyway, I asked her if I was going to do the move, who I needed to speak to in order to make all the changes. She said she could do it. Here’s the secret — she was flat-out, hands-down, awesome. At this point, I had Rogers cable, Rogers internet, I added Rogers home phone, and I had Rogers cellular too. We reviewed ALL of it. And I do mean all of it. We went through each and every service, talked about options, and each and every time I asked a question, she either already knew the answer or clicked four buttons somewhere and came up with the options. All that bundling was complicated, it pushes even my limits, and she kept it all straight, understood exactly what I wanted and didn’t want, gave me options, recommended certain choices and explained why. It took just over an hour, and I never phased her once nor did I ever lose confidence in her performance. She didn’t oversell, she didn’t undersell, she was a customer’s dream representative. And when we finished the call, she gave me the office direct number and her name so that if I had any other questions, I could call her again. She still works there, I’ve spoken to her twice since. And no, I won’t tell you her name or give you the extension. She is MY secret and I am NOT going sharesies.
Fast forward three years, and I have had no problems with my Rogers cable Internet service. It just plain worked from Day 1. Well, maybe Day 2, I did have to do some setup. Rented the modem, and upgraded at one point in there to stronger modem/router combo when we finished the basement so that I could get a stronger wifi signal down there. Other than that, happy with just about everything.
Except the price. I was paying about $80 (excluding some bundling discounts) for unlimited internet, 5 Mbps upload speed and 25 Mbps download. Lots of deals were out with other companies, even Bell. But all of them were for phone internet. I honestly don’t care whether it is phone or cable, generally, just whether it works, and I have a theory about most people’s experiences with one or the other.
Most people are probably average users and are fine with either one. Maybe even 80% of them. It will work fine. Maybe some tweaks, etc., but both will work. Then there is another 5% who cannot work well with either setup…either their own computer setup is wrong, or they’re just idiots, the service isn’t going to work because the problem isn’t the service. And that leaves 15% where there is a definitive difference in quality of service. For example, there are pe ople who are with Bell, have problems with their service, undergo repeated attempts to fix it, and it just keeps being a problem. No matter what they try, it’s just a pain. So they switch, often to someone like Rogers. And suddenly it works. They think it’s a Bell problem, the whole company is the devil’s spawn, blah blah blah, and they like to complain loud and long about it on every forum they can think of, often with a very clear message “Rogers is better and anyone who is still with Bell is just an idiot.” Sitting right next door to them is a Rogers customer. They too had a problem, tried repeatedly to fix it, got nowhere, finally gave up, switched to Bell, and are now the voice of the newly-converted. Bell can do no wrong, Rogers is the devil’s spawn. Sound familiar? It has nothing probably to do with either company. It was just the wires in the house, local config, neighborhood, maybe local interference that was the problem. Not Bell vs. Rogers.
So when I saw all these “cheaper” companies, I balked. Mainly because they were only offering phone internet, and I’ve never tested the wires in the house. The phone wiring looks like it was done by a nervous and forgetful squirrel. Some of the jacks didn’t even “register”. It didn’t fill me with confidence. And if Rogers was working relatively perfectly for me, why mess with a good thing?
Well, here’s the kicker. I decided to make some other changes (discussed later), and I found out something kind of exciting. TekSavvy offered cable internet. In my neighbourhood. Cheaper, but with a slightly different configuration. I looked into it, basically all I would have to do is swap physical equipment, no need for anyone to come to my house to do anything with wires, it would be the identical setup as with Rogers outside, and they would just throw a switch somewhere. It sounded very enticing. Yet I hesitated.
So much of what I do in the house for other stuff, and the future changes, would depend on the internet working reliably. My wife is doing a semester of education this fall, and she needs internet access. Was now REALLY the right time to consider the switch? She was willing, partly for the cost savings, and because we also have our phones or wifi nearby. If it was messed up for a few days, I could get it fixed or working or just go back to what we had. I pulled the plug.
My new package with TekSavvy had same upload speeds (5 Mbps), which was interesting only as Rogers speed tests had never pushed above 3 Mbps. I don’t do a LOT of uploading, but occasionally when I’m backing up to the cloud, some reliable speed is good. TekSavvy’s tests have me at 4.9 Mbps every time, and a couple of times, I broke 5 (5.1, 5.2). No idea why, but it did.
Download speeds with Rogers was theoretically at 25, I would regularly top out at the 20 Mbps range. No biggie, I’m not a huge torrent freak, but I like to get what I pay for when I am downloading. TekSavvy is rated to 30, and I top out at…29.7 so far. Yep, almost exactly as advertised.
The big change is that I am no longer on unlimited transfers per month. The limit is 400 GB. I could drop it to 150 GB and save $10 a month, but thought I would start with 400 for the first few months while I’m figuring out backups to cloud storage too for some other stuff. I might leave it there, I might drop it. I could go up to unlimited for about another $10. Instead, I’m paying $55 a month. In other words, $25 a month less than I was paying for Rogers, although with slightly faster speeds and lower monthly bandwidth allowances. Rogers gave me a counter-offer, would have only been about $10 more than TekSavvy, so within the ballpark.
In the first year, that’s only $300 savings, and the new hardware cost me $200 (I bought the modem / router rather than renting it). I also added another switchbox to the mix, cost me $25 or so, but that was something I had been meaning to do for awhile, just hadn’t gotten around to it. When I had the basement finished, I had wires run from my 2nd floor office to the basement TV area and to the front-room TV area. Internet wiring to each. Actually two to the basement (one for TV, one for games). So, I kind of feel like I come out even for the first year. After that, $300 less per year isn’t a bad savings.
I know there are lots of people who will say, “Oh, TekSavvy sucks, you should be with x”. For me, it’s a lot like the Rogers/Bell fanatics. The only thing that matters is if it works, and mine does. If it stops working, or slows down drastically, I can always switch to someone else. And I’ll be a lot more willing to do that after I made a lot of other changes with Rogers setup already (more to come later). I’m with TekSavvy for my ISP, and that’s it. No other bundling with them. As such, I feel much more in control of my setup and costs.
As long as it works, no need to drastically change. The rate is pretty good, the service is excellent. I didn’t “cut the cord” and get rid of the internet, but I did trim the cost a bit. On to the other areas…
As I mentioned in a previous post (My interest in psychology…), I developed a stronger interest in psychology over time — high school, my tadpole years, losing my parents, my relations with my siblings, becoming an aspiring writer, getting married and having a son. Which was a long way around to say that I have wanted to take an introduction to psychology for some time. And given my past experiences, and a desire to access solid curated content, probably a university course, but not necessarily.
I don’t need it for a degree, I don’t even care if I get a credit for it. Then I found out about free MOOCs — massive open online courses. I don’t care about the massive part, I just need someone professional to have curated some content for me to access and work my way through. Open is great, partly as it usually equates to free. Online limits the time commitment required, and allows me to timeshift it easily. I’ve considered EdX, TheGreatCourses, and Coursera, among others, and I started taking one MOOC earlier this year (Understanding Video Games), just to get my feet wet.
Then I saw an article about my grad school alma mater, Carleton University, offering an introduction to psych course as a MOOC. Sounded good. So I contacted the prof, had a brief exchange, and ended up discussing the future of the course as well as the choice of textbooks. The existing program at the time was using the 3rd Canadian edition of a text that is up to the 9th edition in the U.S. I could see that the 4th Canadian edition had been released and I was curious which version he recommended During the exchange, he mentioned they were revamping and updating the course content to match the 4th edition, with a hope too to come up with a cheaper online version of a textbook. I decided to wait to finish my previous MOOC, and look into the Carleton MOOC come the fall. In the end, I haven’t finished the old one yet, but the new one has started, so I’m doing both.
Getting started on the new course
The new semester started, and I went looking for the course. It was much easier to locate this time (back in the Spring, there were about six clicks to get to the course, now it was just two). Much better site signage and user interface. Which augured well for a good experience. Registering, however, was a different kettle of fish. There were four links that were active — two different courses (Part I and Part II of an intro to psych) plus two different offerings (a previous and ongoing version plus a new version). All four links would allow me to see the description, but all four said “You are unable to enrol in this class”. This lasted about 4 weeks, and I had basically decided to focus on the other MOOC course but got distracted with other things in my life, so when I went to go back to the other one, I thought, “Oh, what the heck, try Carleton again first.” This time it went swimmingly. The system is set up well, all the links were active, I could enrol and did, I was good to go.
There are three main components to the course. First and foremost is the textbook. I ordered it through an Amazon affiliate, and it took 10 days for the book to arrive from B.C. Not superfast, but appeared initially cheaper. Textbooks aren’t cheap, and full price was listed at $140; the affiliate had it for $120. And since there are not many used versions available of the 4th edition, I went with new and online, opting for the convenience of having it delivered instead of having to go find it at the campus store. Apparently I should have waited. The professor had negotiated with the publisher for a loose-leaf binder version plus etext version for $95, which probably would have been more efficient than lugging around the hardcover textbook, but I’ll suffer through. My wife is going to University of Ottawa, and as the text is used in lots of intro courses at various universities, she probably could have picked it up there for me too, so online ordering was more convenient, but I had other avenues I just didn’t pursue. But I digress. I have a textbook, the course is free, my internet is already paid for, on with the course.
The course outline follows the textbook chapter by chapter so while the prof jokes in the lecture materials that it is up to the student to use whatever they want (including Harry Potter texts if they prefer), it is definitely recommended to use the same text that the course follows. Cost wasn’t a factor for me, so I am using the officially recommended text.
The second component is the video lectures. Some people say that video lectures make or break MOOCs. Either the professor is engaging or it’s a giant snoozefest. That is in fact the model that the Great Courses company relies upon — finding great professors who are passionate about their material and recording their lectures (and selling them for profit, obviously). I’d love to know if MOOCs has bolstered or hindered The Great Courses business model, but I assume they’ll adapt their own materials to some sort of online option too. The professor set up a “Chapter 00” to explain how the course will work, give some basics about what the course is about, and generally give people a safe sample chapter to experiment with so they see how it all works before the content starts in Chapter 01. The intent for the course is that you read the textbook to get a feel for the material, and then watch the videos.
The intro to MOOC (Chapter 00) was interesting, and the slides referenced in the videos are available for download / printing. Mostly the videos were pretty well done, engaging, and the transitions between slides and videos were pretty solid. This is way better than the video-lectures you see in university-TV courses, these are direct one-on-“one” lectures to you. Kind of like a documentary, or a newscaster speaking directly to you, not someone lecturing at a roomful of other people and you’re just watching.
You might think that since Chapter 00 is just an intro to the course, there wouldn’t be much to review on substance, and you would be right. There was a general overview of how the two courses (Part I and Part II) use the same textbook and divide at chapter 8 of the text (i.e. 1-8 is Part I, 9-16 is Part II), and how they work well together. It wasn’t perfect, but it was solid. Seems petty to even mention but I suspect all MOOCs have some administrative/logistical challenges. For instance, some of the video links said they were 12 minutes long, but the actual video was only 8 minutes long (likely a change from the original video that was there). Secondly, some of the slides shown in the videos were not exactly the same slides as in the download copy — not contradictory, just editing differences showing a version control problem. Nothing substantive, just might confuse some people who are anal-retentive types or nervous taking courses for the first time. Thirdly, and this is more related to the next section, some of the links regarding quizzes were not exactly where the video said they would be on the menu, and another option seemed to be missing altogether. Again, not huge, and I flagged them for the prof just for quality control improvements in the future.
The third part of the course is the evaluation process. There are self-quizzes as you go through the course materials. Each week covers one chapter in the textbook and has multiple smaller videos that go with that, labelled “a” to “g” for example. In between each video is a self-quiz. These are for self-evaluation, just need to complete them. At the end of the videos i.e. the end of each week, there is a chapter quiz — these count towards a grade, are time-limited, represent a pool of questions from which you randomly do 10, and you have two attempts at it if you want (your score is average of the two attempts). Five points for each quiz, etc. This is a bit different from most MOOCs, as most are just for your own benefit. You can get an online certificate saying you completed the course, but you don’t get a university “credit” for it. There are some exceptions (for example, the video game course I’m doing is also taught as a regular university course, and people can register in it normally and do it as part of their semester, with set time limits etc.). This one is also a bit different too. You still do it at your own pace, but once you’ve done 20% of the course and if you pass the first few quizzes, you can transfer to the “full” credit version of the course and pay tuition, etc. It’s the same course, but you get a university credit for it.
One of the benefits they suggest is that this is a great way to get your feet wet “trying out” university. I think it is more accurate to say this is a great way to try out “online self-paced university”, but in-class university and regular distance university are quite different from this version. Still, it’s an interesting option.
There is an optional fourth element for this course, as there is for most MOOCs — an online forum. In it, they encourage people to network, socialize online, share their experiences, etc. For some, I can see the attraction of this; for me, I’m looking for curated content, not a discussion group to debate issues. Plus, one of the complaints often of MOOC participants is that the schedule is messed up — people start the course in January for example, and make a comment in week 2 on one of the readings (say, January 15th). Then someone else comes along, starting in June, and sees the comment and replies to it in their week 2 (say June 15th). So the first person gets an email saying, “Hey, someone replied to your comment” leaving them to wonder, “WTF? What comment? Huh? I finished that course 3 months ago?”. The idea works well if you can get a cohort that moves through it together at essentially the same pace and with similar start and finish dates. Other than that, people who are on week 8 don’t really care what happened way back in week 2. They’ve moved on.
As an aside, there was an interesting “addendum” for the week. Credits. They posted five videos that served as “credits” for the course — with five other sets of people (the Dean, another prof, some techies, a student, etc) all talking about the course, how it worked, wishing people well, etc. Two were just formal (the Dean, another prof) and could be easily skipped. One was highly amusing as two profs (I think they were profs) did a small series of stand-up skits about how much trouble they have helping out (i.e. sample — “Turn on the computer — okay….do you come here often?”). Cheesy, but not completely lame, humour. Well-done, engaging, and completely irrelevant — I have no idea who they were, what they have to do with the course, why they were doing credits, nada. I presume they helped the prof with reviewing the content perhaps. But there’s no way to know, it’s just them being friendly, and mildly amusing. The best of the batch was one by a student talking about tips on how to stay motivated, keep to a schedule, get the most out of the course, etc. Useful advice, likely watched by almost no one taking the course. After the Dean said “thank you, good luck” for 2 minutes, they likely would assume “nothing I need here and skip the rest of the page”. The last one with the student isn’t even identified as HAVING TIPS, which would increase its viewership.
Why mention all this? Because part of what I’m doing is evaluating the medium and how it engages me or not. Maybe that will be of interest, perhaps not. But every “chapter” review or week’s coverage will also cover that’s week “medium” too, not just the content.
Way back in the dark ages of high school, I took a course that was an introduction to psychology and sociology. I don’t remember what it was called, and I seem to think it was supposed to be one or the other, but ended up being done as a combination when enrolment was low. I don’t remember that much from the course. It was okay, semi-interesting, but it didn’t compel me to want to do a degree in it or anything. Later, when I had electives available in university, it didn’t make my list. Mind you, that was some 30 years ago, when I think they still lobotomized people to let their demons out, so probably not all that useful to me even if I had taken it. 🙂
But as I got older and went through difficult periods in my life, or even just large periods of change and self-reflection, I started to think more and more about how the brain works, how personalities develop, how people misuse their brain to trick themselves into ways of thinking that are not optimal, efficient or even helpful. Self-sabotaging behaviour that your brain either hides or actively encourages vs. ways it helps itself heal. Some moments in my life stand out.
First and foremost was my change in “who I was” going from high school to university to law school to working stiff, through my “tadpole years” of self-reflection and change, and who I became. What pieces were engrained, immutable, part of my bedrock personality and how did they become so? Nature vs. nurture, on a micro-level.
Second, there was the loss of my parents. Similarities in experience yet vast differences too. Was it my age? Change in my support network? Had I just grown more?
Third, the elements of family. I was the youngest of six kids. I discount most of the pop psych about birth order, mostly because I think psych is about individuals, not statistics about groups, but I find one area intriguing. Growing up, I didn’t know my one brother very well. He moved out of the house when I was 5 or 6, and I didn’t interact with him a lot in the next 20 years. It wasn’t like we didn’t see each other, but we were never “close”. In fact, of my five siblings, I would say he was the farthest away in relations. Yet, when we reconnected when I was 30 and he was 40, we experienced a natural bond we had never felt before. It happened over dinner one night — a dinner that almost didn’t happen. He was in town for work, and it wasn’t like “Oh, obviously we’ll do this or that together.” It was more like, “Hey, so, he’s in town. We should probably see each other. Maybe dinner or something?”. Very tentative, like, we *should* do something, shouldn’t we? Wouldn’t most siblings see each other if they were in town? Yeah, we agreed on dinner. And part of the night was like we were finishing each other’s sentences. Even though we have led very different lives — he had been married, had six kids, was very independent early in life, and had been in the military for 20 years; I was the pampered youngest child, not married, no kids, lived at home up until law school — there was an immediate real connection, way beyond friendship, beyond just family. Like somehow our souls knew each other from some other time and place and met up for a beer. Now, I consider him one of my closest siblings and friends. How do our different yet similar beginnings produce vastly different lives and outcomes yet our psyches retain some common elements that look like genetics? Again, nurture vs. nature. Equally, I’ve heard lots of people talk about how they’ve always been close to a sibling, while I’ve been close to different siblings at different parts of my life — close to my next-oldest sibling, a brother, when I was young, say up to age 14; close to my second-oldest sibling in my late teen years; close to my oldest sister and her son when I came back from university and up until my Dad died, and then again more recently; close to my other sister, third oldest, after my dad died and for a number of years afterwards; and closest to my “middle” brother (fourth-oldest) as mentioned above. A wax-and-wane type experience.
Fourth, I became an aspiring writer. I need to know how to access the psyche of a fictional character, how to get into their head and write what THEY would do, not what I would do if I was pretending to be them. To figure out how to flesh the character out fully — the role of hero, villain, mistress, husband — and how to make them real, not names or formulaic archetypes.
Lastly, I became a husband and a father within the same year. Huge changes in my life and in my roles as a person. What role does my behaviour play in my son’s development? He has had some physical challenges, and almost everything he has faced, regardless of what we have done to help him, it really is just him overcoming them on his own. Outgrowing some stuff, ignoring others, figuring out the rest. We help, but the biggest difference over time is just him being awesome. Is it just nature?
All of which has led to a renewed interest in psychology. I don’t want to do a full degree, with electives, exams, papers, etc. I just want the knowledge, not a piece of paper to certify it. And while I can find it just about anywhere (library, internet, Amazon, etc.), what I really wanted is what I always want when looking at a new area — curated content. The fruits of the labour of someone who has already trod the same path before me, who says, “Here is a good framework to understand an issue” and “Here’s some stuff you should read”. I may develop strong interest in certain areas of psychology like child development, but to start, I really wanted a good overview to show me the whole canvas, not the exciting brush strokes in one corner.
Instead of just buying a textbook and reading it, I found a free online psych course, with credentials behind it to reassure me it’s not some quack throwing stuff up on a blog (hey, wait a minute, says my id, but we’ll ignore him for now).
