Negotiating Atlantic Broadband bill

[n4ife]

Has anyone had success in negotiation with ABB to lower their bill? Mine shot up to $75 a month just for internet which is ridiculous for the terrible service. My mom alone pays about $30 more a month for parallel gigabit service, tv with drv and phone from fios so the ABB cost is just horrendous.

Will ABB even offer a lower bill if I call in since they know I basically have no other choices for an ISP? I can pay the $75 a month, no issue but going from $45/month to $75 just stings.

 

[PeoplesElbow]

I've been paying 56/mo

 

[SamSpade]

Has anyone had success in negotiation with ABB to lower their bill? Mine shot up to $75 a month just for internet which is ridiculous for the terrible service. My mom alone pays about $30 more a month for parallel gigabit service, tv with drv and phone from fios so the ABB cost is just horrendous.

Will ABB even offer a lower bill if I call in since they know I basically have no other choices for an ISP? I can pay the $75 a month, no issue but going from $45/month to $75 just stings.

I have the whole shooting match - bundle with cable, phone and whole house DVR - and I am paying almost four times what you pay.

We would go streaming only if there was a way that everyone could still get what they want. Wife is drifting more and more to channels that deal with her hobbies and the kids don't care at all for regular TV shows. And most family oriented fare is either limited on regular TV or we have to scour down on Disney, Netflix or streaming movies.

The big limiter is mostly - phone. As cheap as it must be to go either Internet phone or with the phone company - nobody offers as reliable a service as we've found with the cable company - the only downside being that, unlike the phone company, when the power is out so is the phone (when you have AT&T, you usually still have phone).

The BIG cost is, of course, the DVRs. It is still really convenient to hold a show or back it up when you missed something, and if you have anything resembling live TV, you usually can't get that elsewhere. Similarly, few streaming services offer on demand releases all that close to the release time after it airs on live cable (e,g, you want to watch the season ender for "S.W.A.T." - with DVD, you've recorded it - with streaming, you'll probably have to wait another day).

 

[GURPS]

The BIG cost is, of course, the DVRs. It is still really convenient to hold a show or back it up when you missed something, and if you have anything resembling live TV, you usually can't get that elsewhere.

Are the shows available elsewhere in streaming format ?

I download everything I watch

 

[SamSpade]

Are the shows available elsewhere in streaming format ?

I download everything I watch

They might be - during regular TV season, we dvr all the programs we watch and aside from news and weather - and some sports - we only watch shows we've recorded.

Unless we don't have any we're watching, in which case we just - find something. A game show. A cooking contest show. That sort of thing.
If it was JUST ME - I would drop cable and go with alternatives. The kids honest to god don't care - it's mostly wife wanting to watch her shows in a timely fashion or otherwise having them all lined up on the dvr to watch - for example, if she watches Chicago PD, she's not going to remember that the last show she watched was episode 7 and she needs to go to 8 - and a lot of streaming alternatives are set up assuming you are watching ONLY them. She knows if she watched it - because once she watches it, it is deleted.

I realize it's a big shift and a matter of how things are done - but I honest to god hate spilling nearly 300 dollars a month to keep what we have.

 

[GURPS]

- it's mostly wife wanting to watch her shows in a timely fashion or otherwise having them all lined up on the dvr to watch

yeah my mother does this1

I realize it's a big shift and a matter of how things are done - but I honest to god hate spilling nearly 300 dollars a month to keep what we have.

yeah I think FiOS is $ 250 ish ..... TV - Internet 100 / 100 - 2 Phone Lines

 

[ginwoman]

We have DirecTV (now called AT&T) and pay $117.82 a month for the Entertainment package. I pretty much hate DirecTV because dealing with them about anything takes up half the day and by then I'm ornery and have a headache and more often than not have not achieved anything.

For cable we have ABB (old Metrocrap) and pay $75.74

For phone I have VONAGE (voip) which is like $24 per month. Very happy with Vonage.

 

[RoseRed]

I pay $60.00 for ABB cable wifi and stream TV. I do have YouTubeTV for $49.00 a month and I am very happy with that. I DVR all sorts of shows and watch them at my leisure. It also has 70(?) "live" TV channels. I no longer have a land line phone.

 

[stgislander]

I pay

I have the whole shooting match - bundle with cable, phone and whole house DVR - and I am paying almost four times what you pay.

We would go streaming only if there was a way that everyone could still get what they want. Wife is drifting more and more to channels that deal with her hobbies and the kids don't care at all for regular TV shows. And most family oriented fare is either limited on regular TV or we have to scour down on Disney, Netflix or streaming movies.

The big limiter is mostly - phone. As cheap as it must be to go either Internet phone or with the phone company - nobody offers as reliable a service as we've found with the cable company - the only downside being that, unlike the phone company, when the power is out so is the phone (when you have AT&T, you usually still have phone).

The BIG cost is, of course, the DVRs. It is still really convenient to hold a show or back it up when you missed something, and if you have anything resembling live TV, you usually can't get that elsewhere. Similarly, few streaming services offer on demand releases all that close to the release time after it airs on live cable (e,g, you want to watch the season ender for "S.W.A.T." - with DVD, you've recorded it - with streaming, you'll probably have to wait another day).

Same here. If we had reliable ABB internet, I'd drop the package and go Internet only.