There was no particular last straw.

Just that I’d been thinking for a while that the number of programs I watched on either “live TV” or recorded on the cable PVR just didn’t make sense for the amount of money I was spending monthly. Especially since most of it was available somewhere else, for less. Sometimes for free.

It was convenient, for sure. Turn on the TV, there it is broadcasting, or sitting in my Recorded Programs list. But $25 for the basic channels, plus $5 for some extra channels, plus $5 for the second cable box, every month… When I’m also paying for various streaming services… That’s quite the premium for convenience.

No way to change Rogers services online, though. Got to make the call! My first attempt to make it through the Rogers voice mail labyrinth on a Sunday afternoon ended with a curt

No one is available to assist you now. Call back during regular business hours.

I was wondering how I might manage to carve out a couple hours during the work day for this task when I remembered I had an upcoming day off. What better way to spend it?

On the holiday weekday, I made it through to a human. Now, Rogers had recently increased the cost of extra cable boxes by $7. So above, where I had quoted $5 for the extra box—that was now $12. This had received some bad publicity, so the person I was talking to was pretty much tripping over himself to make that part of the bill better for me…

OK, so I can reduce the cost of that box to $5 a month, so that your bill will be the same as before. Is that good?

Sure, good, but not really enough! I made the point that even before this particular price increase, I was finding the service too expensive for my amount of my usage. I wondered if any other deals were available, such that I could keep my convenience… For less.

The options were just so baffling! It’s all bundles, so there’s no way to change the pricing of the TV package without also affecting the Internet service. Better deals were available if signing up for a two-year contract, but it wasn’t possible to do that with the same thing I had, only with slower Internet and the same TV channels, or with better internet and more TV channels, but then the price advantage wasn’t that great… And…

I pondered. But finally went with somewhat better Internet package, bundled with $5 a month streaming-only TV service, on just one cable box. No live channels. No PVR. No cable.

Billing settled, next step for the Rogers people was my updating my modem and cable box with the new services.

… Which took about two hours, during which I was mostly on hold, but with the Rogers person regular checking in:

Are you still with me? Thank you for your patience. We’re still getting errors. We’re continuing to work on it.

But eventually it took. As parting advice, I got:

Call us back in a month. We should have new deals for you!

Hmm.

I tried things out that evening, and they seemed OK. The Internet was working. The TV was now just a portal into Netflix, Prime, Apple TV, YouTube, etc. (I should note, I guess, that all of our television sets are relatively old, so none of them have access to these services built in.)

The next morning, though, our Sonos music system failed to deploy the alarm as expected. It should wake us up to the dulcet tones of CBC morning radio. What we got instead was the default backup, the Sonos chimes. Which was annoying.

When I tried to stop the chimes, I found that Sonos app was unusable, and unable to find any speakers. Now, Sonos has had its own troubles of late, with an extremely poor app update back in May that the company and all of its customers are still feeling the effects of. I was able to stop the chimes on the Windows version of the app on my computer, as that hadn’t really been updated.

That Sonos wasn’t exactly happy that my wifi network had been changed wasn’t overly surprising, and not necessarily generally worrying.

However… While we definitely still had Internet, it seemed to have become extremely fussy about what it would let us connect to. All Google services were happy pappy. But Reddit was inaccessible. We could use Amazon, but not Ebay. I could connect to X/Twitter, but not to Bluesky. (This is bad!)

But if I switched off wifi and used phone data, I could connect to everything.

Rebooting the modem wasn’t helping.

It was all extremely distracting, but it was also a work day. I started up the work laptop, and soon discovered that my work VPN was another thing that the new network was simply not going to connect to. Jean’s work VPN: No problem!

I messaged people at work that I was having technical difficulties. And I called Rogers support. Weird problem, I said. We can connect to this, but not to that. He ran tests. He asked questions, like:

What is Bluesky?

(Everyone knows what Bluesky is now, right?)

He reported that all looked fine for him. He tried to blame the company VPN, but I resisted the attempt.

The only other thing I can do is send someone out.

He said it as if that was a threat, but it sounded good to me.

I can have someone there within two hours.

And you know what? They did!

And that technician quickly diagnosed that the problem was that our modem was nearly as old as our TVs.

So he replaced it with a new one. And instantly everything worked again. (Even Sonos. Sort of. Mostly! But that would be a whole other blog post to get into.)

And the cable-less life has been OK. Even in the week after that election, when I found that I was mostly in the mood for unchallenging network television, rather than the “prestige TV” that is the hallmark of streaming. I figured out that I could watch the latest episode of Abbott Elementary and Elsbeth on the Global TV website and app. And that from the website, it somehow broadcasts them commercial-free, even after I turn the ad blocker off?

(I’m not going to pretend I understand that, but I’m running with it!)

And that the insanely dumb but somehow still so entertaining Doctor Odyssey is available not only the CTV app / website (commercial-free here too, somehow), but also on Crave, which I’m paying for anyway.

And that Shrinking and (especially!) Acapulco on Apple TV are also equally soothing choices.

And when feeling up to it, I can still watch CTV News, Global News, and CBC News.

Maybe followed by another Doctor Odyssey chasser. Look! A Shania Twain guest spot!