OK, it’s time for some help on a network decision: you’ve all heard of the “triple play” of voice/video/Internet access from a single provider. Well, I’m racking my brains because while I’ve actually got the benefit of competition where I live, there don’t seem to be any good or obvious options to get the triple play.
Here’s what I have now:
- DirecTV satellite for television service (signed up back in 1998 because they were the first and only provider with high-def TV, long before over-the-air HDTV became available)
- Cox cable for broadband Internet access (selected because they were the ONLY provider years ago – I live too far from a telco central office to get DSL)
- Verizon for plain old telephone service (again, the only choice available when I first built the house)
What brought this issue to a head is a recent change in DirecTV. The good news is that they’ve just added a dozen more high-def channels, with the promise of over 100 HDTV channels by the end of the year (2007). The bad news is that these new channels all use MPEG4 compression, and my high-def Tivo DVR, set-top boxes, and 3LNB rooftop dish only work with older MPEG2 channels. I now need a new larger 5LNB dish and all-new hardware to get channels like National Geographic and Discovery in high definition. A big downside is that I’ll have to get rid of my beloved high-def Tivo! That’s right, DirecTV only now offers its own crappy DVRs and set-top boxes, and forces you to pay for them up-front even though they now only lease their hardware. Subscribers don’t get a choice anymore.
I might have accepted this hardware “downgrade” in order to get the new high-def channels except for the way they’re treating me. About a year ago due to a lightning strike, one of my set-top boxes stopped working. Fortunately I had DirecTV’s extra-cost “protection plan,” so they could replace the failed box. But they replaced my owned/purchased box with a leased/rental box, and then after the fact I discovered I was now under a 2-year contractual commitment to DirecTV! (This wasn’t the case a few years earlier when a similar set-top box failure occurred – they changed their terms and conditions without bothering to tell me.)
This week, when I asked DirecTV for installation of a new dish and MPEG4-compatible hardware, they want me to pay $400, because I’m still within the 2 years. (Other customers not under the 2-year lock-in have gotten their hardware changed out for free.) That’s a hell of a way to treat a customer who’s been paying nearly $100/month for 9 years! Looks like I’ll have to pay a $100 termination fee just to leave DirecTV.
OK, so let’s consider my cable company as an alternative. Cox Internet service has been pretty good, and because of competition from Verizon FIOS, they keep bumping my bandwidth at no additional cost: I’m now getting more than 20 Mbps down and 2 Mbps uplink speeds. And of course they now offer high-def channels and reasonable voice service. And like all cable operators, by law they must offer CableCard, so that means I can avoid using Cox’s own crappy DVR and buy a CableCard-compatible High-Def Tivo DVR. I also have a couple of CableCard-compatible HDTVs that would benefit from this technology.
So why not just go with Cox? Like all cable operators, they’ve become RF bandwidth constrained. They’re literally out of cable bandwidth and don’t have room on their system to launch all the same new HDTV channels as DirecTV. So to compete, Cox is one of the first cable operators in the country to deploy “switched” cable service. Their latest digital set-top boxes actually request which channel they want to watch from the cable head-end system, and then cable bandwidth is allocated dynamically for that channel.
While this is terrific for the cable operator, it means that CableCard (which lacks 2-way communications) is now obsolete, and any new Tivo I bought would not be able to receive any of the new HDTV channels. This violates the “spirit” of the agreement that cable operators made with the FCC requiring CableCard support, so supposedly the cable industry is working on a USB “dongle” that will permit a Tivo or other CableCard set-top box to request a specific channel. The problem with this solution is that it could be YEARS before it becomes available and is deployed.
OK, so that leaves Verizon FIOS as the remaining alternative. Most people in the US would “kill” to have Verizon’s service available where they live, so why shouldn’t I just go with Verizon? Let me count the ways: First, as they install the fiber from the street to your house, Verizon always rips out your pre-existing twisted pair copper phone wiring. This is done to keep you from ever going with a competitor (since Verizon is still legally obligated to resell its copper local loops to competitors). Unfortunately, because fiber can’t carry electricity, this means that you lose voice dial-tone during power outages unless your battery backup is working. And where I live, we’ve had multi-day power outages where a battery would certainly fail.
The 2nd problem is that Verizon was very short-sighted in deploying FIOS TV, and didn’t plan for enough “cable” channel capacity. Their single optical wavelength that delivers all their TV channels actually uses old-fashioned cable TV technology, and Verizon needs to upgrade all of the equipment in its central offices to make room for more channels. It reportedly will be at least a year before Verizon can begin adding the new HDTV channels being added now by DirecTV and Cox cable.
Assuming this upgrade occurs, Verizon’s current FIOS system does have the advantage of working with CableCard, thus allowing me to install a Tivo (instead of Verizon’s terrible DVR). And unlike cable operators, Verizon’s optical network should be capable of delivering all the bandwidth needed, without resorting to use of switched channels. So in a year or so, Verizon FIOS might be a pretty reasonable solution.
Except that in 2-3 years, Verizon has said it will be migrating the entire FIOS system to IPTV! Yes, the same technology that AT&T and Microsoft have struggled to deploy in the former SBC territories of the US. This will obsolete any Tivos I might buy, since IPTV is completely incompatible with CableCard technology. But even worse, Verizon has said its future IPTV system will let it monitor EVERYTHING that its customers watch on TV, in order to tailor or target advertising to them. Does this sound appealing to you?
On top of everything I’ve already covered, there’s another issue. The good news is that Tivo has announced that next month it will permit its high-def Tivo DVRs to use customer premises LANs to share recorded programs – something never permitted with DirecTV’s Tivos. For example, you could watch on your bedroom TV a show recorded on the Tivo down in your home theater. Except that the cable operators have all started flagging their channels as “copy never” or “copy once” to enforce digital rights management. This effectively cripples the Tivo networking except for sharing of over-the-air TV shows.
It’s all enough to make me want to give up watching any movies or TV anymore. Got any suggestions?
- Dave Passmore
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