Entertainment Upgrade

Readers of the blog will recall that I have been maintaining a "grandfathered" 40 gig / month data plan with Verizon because my usual method of viewing TV was to stream it over the Internet because I typically wasn't close to cities with over the air broadcasting.  While this worked fine for me it had two drawbacks, it was expensive and data limited, especially towards the end of my billing period.  My Verizon bill was $230 a month!  That was two lines, my phone and my MyFi internet modem.  When I finally paid off my truck (yay!) the Verizon bill was my biggest monthly expense (not counting gas for the truck).  So I made the decision to get a Dish satellite account and at the same time give up my 40 gig data deal with Verizon and go with their unlimited data plan.

R2D2's little brother.

My Dish monthly subscription is $68.  Dropping my huge data plan with Verizon cut my monthly phone bill to $115 so if my math is correct I'm going to save $47 a month.  So I'll be paying less, and getting 120 channels on Dish including The Big 10 Network (go Spartans!) and ESPN, so the quality (and quantity) of my sports viewing will massively increase.  The cool thing about the Dish receiver is that it's virtually idiot proof.  You set it on it's tripod, go inside and turn on the set top box and TV and it asks you what state you're in, after you input the state the receiver automatically aims itself at the 3 satellites in the southern sky and within about 10 minutes you're watching HD TV!

The Mini's counter extension seems like it was made for the Dish box!

After four and a half years of carefully rationing my monthly data pool on only my "must see" TV programs it feels a little strange to watch TV whenever I feel like it.  I'll try to get used to it.

Thanks for reading!