Comcast VS DirectTV's Internet
 

Went to Costco and got sucked into signing up for DirectTV. Currently, we have the Comcast bundle deal that started out at $120 a month and then after a few years has ballooned to over $260 a month for TV, phone and internet. We've always been happy with Comcast for our internet, but wondering if the internet that DirectTV provides will be a big downgrade. As a stand alone, DirectTV TV service is $65 a month for two years, I get the NFL Sunday Ticket package for free and a $300 gift card. Seemed like a good deal. Just not sure about their internet. Don't care who the home phone is through since we rarely use it. Any thoughts?

Direct TV uses a prefered phone provider in the areas where they offer ISP service. The quality of service will depend on the phone company network in your area. Unless you have fiber optic to your home it will be over lower capacity copper twisted pair to the nearest fiber uplink. In my area Comcast has much better speeds. Hope your are happy with your DTV but if you have been using Comcast's X1, on demand and other functions you might be disappointed. The NFL Season ticket is the one thing that is better in my opinion.

DirecTV paired with excede satellite internet where I live. I'm in the country, so traditional internet isn't an option. I just dumped excede for one of those line of site providers. It's cheaper, way faster, and doesn't have a date limit like excede does. Excede was $60 a month with I think a 10 GB limit.

We have Direct TV with the NFL Sunday ticket. TV is awesome. Where we live you can see deer everywhere and mountains too. No Internet service is as good as the service we had back in Virginia. We had Verizon Fios. They were matched up with Direct TV back then. Now Direct TV is in with AT&T. Can't comment on that internet.

Side thought - I have been looking at TigerBox and some other streaming boxes. I do not honestly think I would drop all my cable and such, but maybe. We have over 80MB DL speeds from Comcast so I feel confident there will not be buffering issue. Does anybody have experience with the Streaming boxes?

I was wondering what all the other Techy's are doing out there?

We have fiber to the home here. Don't have the option of dropping it since the entire development is hooked up and it's part of the HOA fees, which are pretty reasonable for what we get. I pay an extra $60/mo to add on HBO, PAC12, and bump the internet from 35/3 to 100/20 (I work from home and the upload bump is what I care most about).

TVwise I mostly just watch HBO (half the time I watch it via Apple TV for convenience) and the occasional PAC12 football/bball/vball game. I'd consider dropping the TV if it wasn't baked in.

Otherwise we mostly watch Netflix Japan so my wife can have subtitles on the shows we watch together. Previously we subscribed to smart DNS and then a VPN when Netflix started cracking down. Now that they fully cracked down on all public VPNs (and even blocked all the Azure and AWS ip ranges, ugh) I set up my own personal VPN between a low-end zotac box here at our house and one in my buddy's apartment in Tokyo.

We also have a Slingbox set up at his place, and one set up here for him to watch USA content on. That and renting movies via Itunes on apple tv (wife's account can get the Japanese subtitled movies) covers the rest of the bases pretty well.

I was looking at Jailbreaking my Apple TV2, but looks like for $100ish I could find some android boxes that stream everything. Anybody test one of these bad boys?