Well, my most recent distraction has been trying to see if I can get rid of cable. Unfortunately, this comes with a lot of logistics that I need to prove out first, partially for myself, and mostly for my family 🙂 If you are anything like me, your cable + internet bill is usually around the $200/month (or more). Now, the biggest thing I complain about is that I’m paying well over a $100/month plus equipment rental fees, and in reality, I watch about 10 of the 200+ available channels. I’ve had more and more friends do this, so I thought I’d start to see what I could do.
First off, here’s a great post with tons of information that I’ve been using to get started.
https://www.groundedreason.com/cable-tv-alternatives/
Of course, things are never as easy as I would like. My first issue was that my uverse modem was old, so my speeds and connections were average at best. So after an hour or more with AT&T, I finally get a new router shipped to me. This was great, finally signal strength for the whole house, AC coverage, etc. Well, needless to say, that caused me tons of headaches for my SAP servers. A new router means all different settings. I think I finally have things working on that front, but starting yesterday, the internet keeps dropping. I have wi-fi, just no internet. As soon as I restart it, it works again. So great, I need to restart my router multiple times per day =(
the next big issue is that I decided to get rid of the wireless uverse box upstairs in my office. So far, all I’ve used that for is the Ethernet ports. Of course, that lead me down a whole different rabbit whole of how to get signal to all my computers upstairs. I’m wireless on most of the devices, but the servers don’t really run that well (and one won’t run at all unless it’s hardwired). So I think I’m going to go with a wi-fi extender with an ethernet port, then connect that to my switch so all my servers have connectivity.
NETGEAR AC750 Dual Band Gigabit Wi-Fi Range Extender (EX6100)
if anyone has experience with doing this, I’d love to hear from you. The sheer number of options are mind boggling, so a lot of my experiment is trial and error.
Next up, my Roku and antenna are on the way… so I’ll have more to talk about after I start experimenting with those.
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike