A new year, a new decade, a time to trim the spending.

We have had Time Warner Cable as our cable television, internet and phone for the past few years under the “all the best” plan. According to Time Warner the “all the best” plan is a cheaper alternative to have TV, Internet and Phone service, bundled though them as aposed to having three service providers.

We have 4 tvs two of which are HD, and two are SD we had 3 digital cable boxes and one tv on basic cable. For the internet we have a wireless router, and a gigabit wired LAN. The phone was

digitalphone using the cable network. All of this was costing us about $170 a month.

Now that would not be to horrible if it worked all the time, but there was always issues with our service. During the time we have had Time Warner Cable we have made probably over 10 service calls and had just as many techs out to our house to fix the same issue over and over, weak signal…

Our neighborhood was built in the 1940′s and its aging infrastructure is starting to show its age, the city is constantly working on improving services and ripping the road up replacing sewer, and street lighting. But you rarely see Time Warner Cable upgrading there hardware.

Our tv’s where constantly breaking up and showing blocky digital snow, the internet was slow and unreliable especially during peak hours (6 – 10am and 5 – 12 pm), the phone service was working fine but it would hard to mess that up.

The last few techs to come to help with the low signals said that the level from the pole was marginal but just good enough for them to not send a maintenance crew out to fix the issue.

So now that it is the new year we wanted to see what services we could give the axe and ways we could save some of our hard earned money.

I spent a few days researching and came up with a solution, cancel Time Warner Cable and get DSL for internet and Satellite TV, we will not have a home phone as we primarily use cell phones.

Here is the setup we just finished installing:

• DirecTV, two HD receivers, two SD receivers. $56 a month with 12 month promo and AAA discount
• DSL Extreme, 6/768 DSL month to month no contract for $37 a month
• Phones, for now we will not have a land line, but an alternative would cost $11 a month from VoicePulse Connect

So we have taken our bill from $170 a month to $93 a month that is a $77 a month savings, and we really arent sacraficing service quality.

DirecTV is 100% digital unlike Time Warner Cable that uses analog for all their standard channels, and we now have a tuner box on all the tv’s in the house. The picture quality on the DirecTV is so much more crisp and the blacks are not fuzzy like Time Warner Cable was.

DSL Extreme is a slower rated speed than Time Warner Cable but it is a dedicated ADSL line that will not slow down during peak hours, and from my line tests it provides a lower ping and better line quality. Even with the slower rated speed it appears faster then Time Warner Cable.

If we had chosen to sign up for phones it would have been $11 a month using a VOIP solution designed for businesses, I would have to run a PBX but i can get the sof

tware for free (trixbox) and i would have a lot more freedom than I ever would with Time Warner Cable.

To end this post I am happy to have finally cut the cable and try something new.