At the end of May, my wife Paula and I received a note from Comcast explaining that we had been getting undercharged for our cable service—and to expect that to stop pretty darn quick. This note set in motion a course of events that would lead to my trip last week to Comcast's Baltimore customer service center to turn in our cable boxes once and for all and cut the cable cord.

Well, sort of. But I'll get to that in a minute.

The move by HBO to break free of cable and offer its programming streamed over the internet certainly played a role in Paula's assent to the termination of our consumer relationship with Comcast. But it was just one of a number of evolutionary changes in our viewing habits that had all but assured the cable box's demise. When Paula was recovering from surgery just over two years ago, the Ars staff gave her a Roku box to keep her entertained while on home bedrest. We had an Apple TV as well (the first generation), but it hadn't been used for much other than streaming iTunes to our living room. And then when the XBox One arrived last year, it broke things open a bit more.

But through all that, our Xfinity subscription kept going, sucking away close to $150 a month—and that's not including the Internet. For various reasons, I had moved to Comcast Business Internet service before joining Ars—the biggest of them being that it gave me dedicated customer service and a reasonable expectation that they'd match their advertised quality of service. Also, I had run up against data caps with my consumer service. (Comcast allegedly stopped enforcing data caps in 2012, but the quality of service concerns I had remained.) And, as it turns out, Comcast essentially has a broadband monopoly in Baltimore.

Thanks to a franchise agreement with the city last renewed by then-Mayor Sheila Dixon (who also pressured Comcast to do business with a company her sister worked for), Verizon has been unable to bring FiOS into Baltimore City. The only other alternatives have been Verizon DSL and, for a short period, the Clear wireless "broadband" service. There are only a few places in the city where FiOS has snuck in—mostly due to new construction, where the franchise agreement doesn't cover cable right-of-ways.

So, while I've dropped XFinity, I'm still Internetting with Comcast Business.

The break-up







Since the cable TV bill was in my Paula's name, she got to make the call to break the bad news to Xfinity that she was breaking up with them. The call only lasted just over 10 minutes; there was no insane antics from the "retention specialist", and everything was cordial and professional. Of course, Paula is a librarian and has a certain information-desk telephone voice she puts on that is firm, direct, and could crush the spirit of nearly any telemarketer. So your mileage may vary.

I drew the short straw for the equipment return. I tried looking up the location for returns in Baltimore, but the Xfinity website told me that it could not find any locations for my ZIP code—or even for Baltimore. It did offer to let me pay my bill via Western Union, however.

The retention rep provided an address, and so did Google Maps. Comcast's sole customer service center in Baltimore is in a building in an office park in the city's northwest corner. Bearing a box full of boxes, I headed over to hand over the gear—the main high-definition digital television box from our entertainment center with the DVR and all that, and...one of two smaller standard definition converter boxes that had connected televisions in other rooms. One, which had been disconnected by my son long ago, had mysteriously vanished.

Upon arrival, I found there was no one in line. I started to step up to the counter. A woman behind it said, "Sir, please get in line," pointing to the maze of crowd control belts on one side of the room. I looked around, shrugged, and walked over to the front of the designated line area. A moment later, another woman came out and acknowledged me, allowing me to step forward into the presence of the counter.

Other than that, the turn-in went without a hitch. I got my receipt for the equipment (as people on Twitter warned me, "MAKE SURE YOU GET THE RECEIPT") and mentioned the missing gear. I was told I would have to call customer service and get a trouble ticket for the box (which is either slowly decaying in a landfill somewhere or is buried in a box my son moved out with but never unpacked).

Okay, so I'm at the customer service center, but I have to call customer service to set up a trouble ticket?

When I called it in, the representative was friendly and excited that I knew exactly what I needed. She then informed me that Comcast would get back to me by August 4 to tell me how to resolve it. In other words, I was paying for cable until then.

Tuning in

To replace the now-gaping hole in our entertainment center and provide local television access, I acquired a Mediasonic HOMEWORX HW180STB—a digital tuner with a digital video recording capability for time-shifting over the air television. That, in turn, jacked into the XBox One, so that I could continue to have the joy of shouting television station names into the air to change channels—an exercise that has become something of a favorite household tradition. It cost $32.

I also bought two Amazonbasics "ultra-thin" HDTV antennas. For the living room, I purchased an amplified antenna with an advertised 50 mile range. For the bedroom, where we watch most of our broadcast television, I got a smaller, unamplified antenna—largely because I live in a rowhouse so close to Baltimore's TV Hill that I could probably get sufficient signal by hanging a wet coaxial cable from a picture hook.

Aside from the 15 minutes spent trying to find the remote for the Mediasonic box after a cat batted it under a couch, the whole exercise of jacking in my free broadcast TV replacement for local channels took under 10 minutes—and most of that was auto-scanning for channels. The XBox One recognized the Mediasonic as a set-top box, and pulled local listings for the OneGuide channel guide based on my ZIP code.

Speeding up

I was concerned about whether all the streaming video my family would now be watching would drag down my Internet performance for work and Call of Duty. When I switched to Comcast Business Internet, I was getting the fastest speed available in Baltimore at the time: 27 megabits down, 7 up. Sometimes it made better than 30, but often it did not.

I bemoaned my network speed on Twitter after comparing it with what a colleague was getting from Xfinity consumer broadband (hint—it was roughly 5 times better than me), and the @ComcastCares Twitter account piped in, offering to check my situation out if I followed and direct messaged my account number. "I can see you definitely have a signal issue," the rep on the Twitter account said, offering to send out a technician.

Hey, I was paying for that dedicated support, right? So why not.

Well, after replacing some connectors and making sure we had closed off all the dead ends left by missing cable boxes, the technician told me that the cable modem I had was rated up to 75 megabits per second. Comcast had begun stealthily upgrading available bandwidth in Baltimore over the past year—and started offering service up to and beyond 100 megabits per second. But they continued to charge me the same rate for 27/7, even though the rate I was paying was now the base for 50 megabits up and 10 down.

With a phone call to customer support, I doubled my available bandwidth for no extra fee. And then I beat my head on my desk for a while.

The experience so far

I am still apparently paying for cable. Thanks to the franchise agreement, and the fact that I reported a $30 SDTV cable converter box missing, I will be paying for cable until August 4—at which time Comcast will inform me how much I have to pay them for the missing box, and stop charging me for something I'm not using. I got a bill for another month's service a week after turning my gear in. At least that's the way I interpret what customer service said when I called in to "create a ticket."

However, once that is done with, I will be paying Comcast $140 less every month (including taxes I won't be paying).

We are paying for multiple streaming services: Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Prime. The combination of the services costs about $24 a month. We were using these services alongside cable, so it's not like they're exactly replacement costs; I'm not even sure if we'll be using them more than we already did, because we sort of backed into the streaming lifestyle without even realizing it. HBO Now will eventually be added to the mix, but probably not until one of the series I care about starts up again.

As for what we're missing, I'm not sure I'm upset about being out of the loop around the virtual water cooler about Sharknado 3. I have lost access to sports channels—including MASN, the network co-owned by the Orioles and Washington Senators Expos Nationals. ESPN, NBC Sports and Fox Sports. But there is a bar five blocks from my house that has all those channels on seven days a week, and National Bohemian is something you need to drink in the compay of others anyway. Besides, based on what I'm saving I can take the family to the ballpark at least twice a month, concessions included.

As for whether my money-saving honeymoon with the cord-cutting life will work out...stay tuned.