Typical Monthly Cable Bill

I’m curious about what folks are paying now-a-days for cable TV/Internet. Xfinity has gone crazy with their billing. Our December invoice was $189.10 our April invoice is for $227.27. If my math is correct that’s nearly a $40 increase. What the heck is going on? We have a cable box in our living room that I think is considered the master, we have a smaller box in our bedroom and we have a router for internet.

Netflix and Amazon Prime are billed separately.

Does $227/mo sound a little pricey or am I just not keeping up with costs?

ImAGolfer

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I dropped Optimum when they increased my monthly charge for just internet to around $124/month. I dropped Direct TV years ago when they were charging $130 something for basic tv. Today I have youtube tv for $81, Prime video included in my monthly charge or prime, Netflix for $13/month and I can’t watch all the programming thats available although I try. Oh, I switched to Vexus fiber (1 gig service) for $39/month no contract. HTH…doc

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I’m payng $83/month through Xfinity for a land line and 90MB internet. (Gave the TV to Goodwill 20 years ago.) Also paying $10/month for a flip phone that I use maybe twice a year but need to carry on my bike rides for emergency use.

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What people are paying is not the whole story - what you get is at least 25% of the question. We live in North Georgia. We have AT&T fiber - the lowest price option - 300 Mbps label. We normally get 350 download and 370 upload. We use DirecTV stream for cable service. Have two TVs. Total bill for this is $180. Buy Acorn, Apple+ and Britbox. Also we get Amazon Prime - hard to say how much is TV and how much is related to “stuff”

A little more overall, we run about $200 a month for xfinity, a bundle, triple play, DVR + one other box, but I ignore the voice side of it, gave their modem back, bought my own cable modem, so no monthly rental to them, suggested actually by the local service tech at their store… But it includes HBO, HBO MAX, Showtime, and a couple others as well as the Sports pack. But we also have other services, Apple TV+, Prime, sign into others as needed for shows, but no Hulu or Netflix, so far… Web speeds, seems to handle 4K streaming OK, my wifi jobbers are old, could be improved, but we don’t see the need, so it is what it is… No fiber available, once had at&t DSL. way slower, bad underground copper, gave up on it…

weco\

PacBell was supposed to bring fiber tot he curb, 20+ years ago, Project Pronto, but cost of trenching and all the local permitting killed it, so many unknowns in older towns, skeptical councils, really messy, we (WeCo) had acres of fiber, hardware ready, managers, crews, but it just was near impossible, a few new housing areas maybe got it going, but overall, nope…

Short version: I pay too much.

My cable company is COX.

I pay for 500 Mbps internet. That is $84.99, plus $14.00 for the hardware, so $98.99 in total.

For TV I have most of the movie channels (Cinemax, HBO Max, Showtime, Starz), and a DVR. The programming comes to $125.00, the hardware $13.50, for a total of $138.50.

Throw in $18.70 in taxes and fees, and the grand total is $256.19.

Fiber is available, or so I am told, from the phone company, Frontier Communications. One gig for $70. I am sure if I went with that and played games with TV service over it I could come out saving money. The problem is that what I have now works. I have everything I want, and can schedule the DVR very simply. So I keep paying through the nose for the simplicity of it all.

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We’re over $300 mo, maybe $330 or something. (Xfinity) Then again we get a lot of everything: basic, digital, Showtime, HBO, Hi-Def tier, phone line, broadband. We still rent the modem which is stupid, but without their modem we don’t get the phone line, so we eat it. (And add anther $10-$12/mo for 2 TiVos).

We’ve been talking about cutting the cord; our local utility is doing a buildout for broadband which is supposed to be available to us in December; we’ll look at it and probably make some changes then.

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Xfinity/Comcast: extremely reliable services, fast internet. Extortion-level pricing.
For a Triple Play re-renewal, I was at a deceptively advertised $99 deal including NESN; for which they tacked on $15 for regional sports and $15 for “local broadcast channels” and then of course taxes and the damn modem rental - so, about $165-$170. Then 2 months ago bang, yeah $220 is back. I guess my TP deal ended. I want to go to internet only and kill the VOIP “landline” but I fear the battle and our VZ cell service is still a bit sketch.
Their TV is 300+ channels of mostly crap bundled because.
YTTV back up to @80 without NESN.
FuboTV about the same, not sure if NESN. I don’t really care except hockey in 5 months.
A couple of streamers (HBOMax, Netflix) for another $25/mo.

Cell service at my house is pretty poor, but on my phone I enabled WiFi Calling. As long as my WiFi and internet connection are up phone calls and texts skip the cellular system altogether. On my iPhone it is under Settings / Cellular.

(If the internet goes down I can’t make or take calls until I turn off WiFi on the phone and it reverts to cellular. Then I use my ISP’s app, via cellular, to view their network status. It always seems to say that there is an outage in my area and I can expect it to be back in eight or nine hours. Then it starts working in a couple of minutes.)

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Advice to all. Renting a cable modem from them is the biggest ripoff of all. You can buy your own on Amazon for $50-150 and save the $7-20 per month. It pays for itself in less than a year, and you’ll likely be using the service for many years to come.

I bought my first one in 2012 for $87.99 (this info is from my Amazon history) and then upgraded it to a new one that can handle “gigabit” service in 2019 for $88.99 (really, exactly $1 higher more than 7 years later, also from Amazon history). Meanwhile, my cable company just raised their modem rental price to $15/mo around here, that’s $180/year. What a ripoff!

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Great advice MarkR, I bought my own cable modem as well and the monthly fee over 12 months was way more than the modem cost. I recently switched to fiber and they gave the converter box to me free if you can believe that…doc

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We cut the cord back in 2014. Currently pay $62.15 a month total for 500 Mbps Internet only from Breezeline (used to be WOW!) and have supplied my own cable modem for the past twenty years. At the same time we switched to BasicTalk for our landline phone. It was $12 bucks a month and they supplied their own voice router for free. I also have Hulu ($8.59 per month) and Amazon Prime.
We’ve had SlingTV, either orange or blue service levels over the years and was paying $53 per month in 2021 when I cancelled that. And cancelled our landline via BasicTalk at the same time.

Personally, I find myself spending less and less time watching TV and on the Internet in general. I still watch movies and I also installed an antenna on the roof for over the air channels. But for $75 a month and an additional $30 per month for my Consumer Cellular smartphone, I have access to all the outside entertainment I need.

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Being the dummy I am I would appreciate some model numbers or brand name of the cable modems you guys purchased. My casual browsing of Amazon came up with modems but they were ‘way’ more than $80. Maybe I’m using the wrong search criteria. Thanks.

First of all, what speed internet connection will you purchase. My modem was an Arris 1gig rated modem. Its sitting in the closet now since I switched to fiber optic. If you lived here close (TX) I would give it to you…doc

FWIW, current one I bought/use for Comcast/xfinity - Motorola MB8600 Cable Modem on 2/27/21, simple, but I still use Apple Extreme & Express units for my WiFi & Router needs, that feed a couple 8 port switches and a lot of Cat5 ethernet cabling… (this update was to get to DOCSIS 3.1. requested by Comcast) Now they are pushing WiFi hardware, but I don’t see the need…

This is the one I have now - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ND1PQMS/ref=dp_cr_wdg_tit_rfb

It works admirably. I have never had to reset or restart it during regular use, not even once. The only time it restarts is after a [rare] power failure, or when the cable company downloads new software or profiles into it and then they restart it remotely. Once, after doing some outdoor repairs, the cable company requested that I restart it, so I did with no issues.

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I believe I bought my Arris at Best Buy…doc

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Just a quick addendum because I remembered something. When I purchased my first cable modem in 2012, I had to return it and get a different one instead (both Motorola models and just one digit difference between them) because it wasn’t compatible with my cable provider’s network at the time.

So before purchasing a cable modem, make sure it is on the list of compatible ones for your cable provider in your area.

xFinity - Using Approved Third-Party Equipment for Xfinity Internet and Xfinity Voice - Xfinity Support

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Thanks for all the links to various modems. It’s funny one of the suggestions was a Netgear. I just retired a Netgear N600 that I was using in tandem with Xfinity/Comcast’s modem. I have no idea nor can I remember why I did that but since removing it I don’t experience nearly as many freeze frames, stuttering, ups, downs, unplugs, remove cable, stand on your head and count BBs as I used to. My guess is the Netgear was slowing down the Xfinity router.

Also thank you for the list of approved third party modems.

For info I’m in the greater Houston area.

There are two things necessary:

  1. A modem - this connects to the cable (a coaxial wire) on one side, and provides an ethernet connection on the other side (an RJ-45 wire) usually used to carry Internet traffic.
  2. A WiFi router - this connects to the ethernet connection on one side (coming from the modem), and on the other side provides WiFi access and usually a few wired (RJ45) ethernet connections as well. Your devices connect to these (WiFi or wired).

Your Netgear N600 is a router, not a modem.

There are some manufacturers that make a modem and router in one device. I don’t like those because they are usually less configurable and sometimes cause “weird” issues.

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