A couple weeks ago, Sean solicited suggestions for telecommunications solutions as he prepares to move into a new home.  In Sean’s own words:

I’m looking into options for phone service, cell phone service, cable, and internet. I know there are certain packages out there and want to get your opinion on what you like and/or what you don’t. Obviously, we want something that works but also won’t cost too much. We’re not sure yet whether or not we’ll go cell phone only and get rid of a home phone. … Finally, a DVR, whether through Tivo or another company is a must.

Now I’m not too familiar with a bunch of different packages that telecom companies might offer.  Moreover, I’m sure the options Sean will have will be rather limited by what providers offer services in his new place.  I was happy with the service I got from RCN at my old apartment, but when I moved four blocks away, I found that they didn’t service my new building.  As a result, my recommendations are often more general and philosophical than to recommend a specific provider.

It’s also worthwhile to note that I have some early adopter tendencies when new technologies can save money or provide valuable new options.  For instance, while Sean is still struggling with the question of whether to drop his landline, I did so back in 2000, before anyone I knew had given that a try.  Disclaimers out of the way, here’s a few suggestions after the jump, many of which I’ve already put into practice:

Phone Service

I dropped my landline back in 2000 and aside from a brief spell in law school, haven’t looked back.  Although a landline isn’t really right for me, I can understand that some folks might want to have one.  Fortunately, home telephone service has some great options for saving some money if you’ve been using your local phone company’s “universal” package (probably also their “most popular” plan).

Right now, Verizon’s website is advertising their unlimited plans starting at $40/month.  Ugh!  I’m sure this price point is set to push people toward an all-in-one cable/Internet/phone package, but right now, we’re just looking at component pricing and services.  On that front, a quick and easy answer to unlimited home phone service would be to give Vonage a call to sign up for their unlimited service at $25/month.

But if your home phone needs are just occasional – and anyone considering whether to ditch the landline presumably falls into this category – we can do better.  Dig a little deeper into Verizon’s landline offerings and you’ll find that you can get dial tone for as little as $6 a month, with additional charges of 6 cents per call placed.  If you’re only making a few calls per week, you can get your landline service for under $10 a month!  That’s pretty cheap and well-tailored for most people, but we can still do better.

For just $3 a month, you can sign up for unlimited calling to the US and Canada via Skype.  Now this is the part where my disclaimer about being an early adopter comes into play, because in order to do this, you’re going to be using your computer as a telephone.  Even better, if most of your landline calls are to a particular person, get them to install Skype as well and enjoy free Skype-to-Skype calling.  For me, this solution works extremely well because it lets me talk to folks as though they were sitting there in my apartment.  There’s no handset to hold to my ear, the most basic microphone is sensitive enough to allow me to walk all over my apartment and if you want, Skype offers videoconferencing.  The solution works so well that my family is starting to adopt Skype for the bulk of their calls amongst one another.  It is important to note that one cannot call 911 via Skype and also that I haven’t actually used the SkypeIn or SkypeOut services that allow interaction with the public telephone network, but it’s certainly a worthwhile option to try.

Cell Phone Service

OK, so I’m a bit of a geek… but for all the early adopter talk, I’m still using the same cellphone that I got back in 2004.  That’s right, my cellphone is over five years old.  It doesn’t play music, it doesn’t have thousands of apps… heck, it doesn’t even really handle text messaging in a straightforward manner… but you know what it does do well?  It places and receives telephone calls.  That is to say, my cellphone is good at performing the core function of a cellphone.

Now sure, it would be cool to have one of these newfangled smartphones that can wake you up, cook your breakfast and pick out your clothes in the morning, but y’know what else?  They’re expensive!  I don’t tend to spend a whole lot of time on the phone; I can usually email, instant message or otherwise call lots of people.  Consequently, I have a barebones cellphone plan, for which I’m paying Sprint about $35 a month.  And while I certainly can’t deny that a smartphone would be useful to me on occasion, it’s certainly not worth the $60 or so that the service would cost me on a monthly basis.  The fundamental question here is how much service you really need.

Otherwise, I don’t really have a lot to say about cellphone plans.  Maybe when the AT&T’s exclusivity deal with the iPhone runs out this summer, we’ll see more competition between carriers on price.  In the meantime, it seems like you might as well pick the carrier that gives you the best signal.  That being equal, go with whatever hardware device you like the most.  But if you’re shopping on price, you probably already know that you’ll typically save the most money with Sprint and T-Mobile.

Cable

We’ve all heard the old lament about cable that there’s 500 channels and nothing on.  In fact, I had this experience when I was visiting my cousin a few weeks ago.  I woke up early one morning, flipped on the teevee and found absolutely nothing I was interested in watching.  This isn’t to say that there is never anything worth watching on cable… surely there is.  But by and large, the vast majority of people aren’t interested in the vast majority of the programming on cable television.

At the same time, television content is increasingly available via the Internet.  Services like Hulu and Clicker make it easy to find the shows you’re looking for and if a studio hasn’t put its shows out there for free online viewing, pay services like Amazon and iTunes allow for on-demand viewing.  If you’re looking to catch up on past seasons of a show or if you don’t need your shows hot off the press, there’s also Netflix.

Even live sports aren’t hard to pick up online.  In fact, with package deals from the NFL, MLB and NHL, you may get even more coverage of your favorite team than you get from the cable company (especially if you live out-of-market).  There’s also free golf at PGAtour.com and a litany of options at ESPN360.com and Justin.tv.  Again, some of these are pay services, but they’ll also be more versatile than cable and they’re available at a fraction of the cost.

Now you can watch this all on your iPhone or your tiny netbook screen or the PC in your office.  But it really works best when you’re working with a machine that’s hooked directly up to your television.  In my case, my television is my computer monitor.  But if you’re not willing to take that step just yet, you can certainly take advantage of the convergence of declining price and improving quality in the HTPC market and get a dedicated machine to hook up to your TV for less than the price of a year’s worth of cable.  Hey, you can use this as your home phone too!

The long and short of what I’m saying is that life without cable or satellite TV is easier than you think.  Furthermore, because of these factors, I suspect that ten years from now, cable television as we now know it won’t exist anymore.  On an even shorter timeline, cable and satellite television will be as archaic and disposable as landline telephone service is today.  In fact, the early adopters are finding that to be the case already.

Although I only pay for a Netflix subscription, I’m finding that I usually have too much stuff to watch.  Without cable.  Awesome.  I can’t help but recommend that other folks give the cable-free life a try, especially if you’re looking to save some cash.

DVR

Just a quick aside to note that as the television world moves from cable and timeshifting to on-demand viewing patterns, the future is bleak for DVR generally and TiVo specifically.  Take a look at this chart of TiVo subscribers over the last few years.  That’s not what you want your business to look like.  Besides the structural problems that TiVo is facing, they’re also losing market share to DVR services provided by cable companies as well as homebrewed DVR solutions, including new Windows 7-based solutions.  These are among the reasons why Jason Chen argues that you don’t need a TiVo anymore over at Gizmodo.  So go ahead and get one if you like, but be mindful that your investment may not last as long as you hope.

Internet

As you may have guessed by now, this is the one critical area that will be (or will soon be) the linchpin of all your telecom needs.  There’s also not much to say here, since your options are probably limited to whatever DSL or cable modem service your various local telecom providers offer.  Here, different people in different locations will get different results as far as the superiority of one medium or the other.  All I can say here is give one company a try.  If they don’t work out, try another.  I’m running 7 Mbps max download speed, 768 Kbps up and for me that works fine (although I would be awfully tempted to switch to FiOS should Verizon ever get around to installing it in my neck of the woods).  Generally, if you’re paying somewhere around $50 a month for your Internet connection, you should be getting plenty of bandwidth for most of your needs.

So that’s the full story.  Long and short of it is:  don’t pay for more than you’re going to use productively, look into setting up a home theater PC that can handle as many of your telecommunications needs as possible and route what you can through a good Internet connection.  Put that all together and you can save money while perhaps getting more features, flexibility and customization in your telecom services.

Over the last few days, President-elect Barack Obama has become embroiled in a controversy that may shake his presidency to the very core. Reports have come out that Obama uses a Zune! On its own, this news would be controversial and maybe shocking… but wait, there’s more!

You see, a few months back, Al-Qaeda gave the Zune its endorsement on national television. At the time, Obama was battling allegations that he had close ties to terrorist organizations. Having won the election, Obama’s true colors, his terrorist sympathies and his Zune are all now coming out in one convenient package. His aides, are already trying to cover up the story by insisting that Obama uses an iPod. However, until he shows us his digital media player, his playlists and maybe a few cool apps on whatever phone he’s using… will the American people believe him?

This is phenomenal. You’re looking at the first visible light picture of an extrasolar planet that has been taken by mankind. Fomalhaut b – presumed to be similar in size and mass to Jupiter – orbits its parent star 25 light years away from Earth. This photograph taken by the Hubble telescope was released yesterday, along with the first direct (near-infrared) image showing a planetary system circling a different star, taken by the Gemini North telescope. I’m always amazed by the somewhat incomprehensible speeds, temperatures, sizes and distances involved in astronomy, so to be able to get a snapshot of a planet over 762 trillion miles away… well, that’s hella impressive.

That said, who’s got The Ring? This system looks pissed and it’s probably sending some badass interstellar ringwraiths for us as we speak. Somebody had best get their ass down to Fomalhaut and toss in the ring ASAP. Thanks!

I couldn’t help but look at this snazzy analog/digital hybrid clock and laugh a bit. You see, it’s not the unusual method of displaying time that caught my attention, but rather the actual time being displayed here. Next time you come across analog timepieces in a magazine or while browsing a store, check out the time that they’re set to. More often than not, it’s 10:10.

There’s an urban legend that this relates back to Abe Lincoln or JFK’s time of death, but in reality, the choice is much more practical than that. Pointing the clock hands at 2 and 10 serves two marketing purposes: it frames the manufacturer’s name/logo (often placed below the 12) and it makes the hands form a happy little “smiley face.”

The irony here, of course, is that there is no logo on the clock front and there’s no hour hand to form the other half of the “smile.” Nevertheless, Pinto chose to make a nod to the 10:10 tradition, so I’m giving them some props.

Two awesome new features from Google Maps for those looking to navigate DC made their debut last week. First was the long-awaited street view feature, which allows you to see actual images of what a given place (ie: my old apartment) looks like from the street.

Google also added a neat little feature that lets you search for directions including public transit. The car/walk/transit toggle is right below the address inputs on the directions screen or you can just go to the Google Transit homepage, which lists all of the municipalities where the service is available. Sweet!

Last week, renowned author Michael Crichton lost his battle with cancer.  Crichton, of course, is best known for Jurassic Park.  In one of those coincidences that has to make you scratch your head, it was on that same day that researchers in Japan announced the successful cloning of mice that had been frozen in permafrost for 16 years.  This breakthrough raises hopes that a frozen and now extinct woolly mammoth may one day be cloned an introduced into a real-life Pleistocene Park.  Maybe someone should run the film by these guys, eh?

I’ve been living without a television since I moved into my new apartment six months ago. Between organizational, technological and economic considerations, this was an easy and somewhat obvious choice. My new apartment is small… roughly 350 square feet… and I didn’t want to have two video display devices. My television was a big flat screen CRT that weighed 100 pounds and my computer monitor is a svelte flat panel. With an ever-expanding plethora of options for video via the internet, I figured I could get 90% of what I wanted to see streamed through the computer, making the monitor a considerably more versatile option.

With all this available, why spend $50 a month for cable? When I had cable, I already felt like I was wasting enough time watching entertaining but ultimately disposable shows (hello Top Chef and Project Runway!). Then consider that Comcast is the lone cable provider for my building. Comcast’s service is unreliable and their customer service is horrific. No way was I going to pay them for anything, especially when I didn’t need to.

Moving to life without television was a bit of an adjustment… For one, my apartment suddenly seemed a lot quieter. This may be because my old place overlooked a six way intersection, but I think that my television was often used as a source of ambient white noise, occasionally catching my attention when something interesting would pop up. I also didn’t realize just how much I was taking cues from broadcasters to contextualize events and the world around me. Without the hype of a television, how would I know that I was supposed to be out grilling and picnicking on the Fourth of July??

There have also been a few televised events that I have missed because the content wasn’t available online… or at least not to me. Most notably, I was very sad to miss virtually the entire Beijing Olympics. Although there was extensive coverage provided online, the Silverlight video player wasn’t compatible with my PowerPC-based Apple.

I briefly considered a Netflix subscription to make up for the potential entertainment gap. Eventually, I found this wasn’t necessary… It may be desirable nonetheless, however Netflix’ online movie delivery also wasn’t available to Mac users. At least, that was the case until this week, when Netflix announced support for streaming video on Macs. The only catch here is that they’ll be using the same Silverlight player that NBC used for the Olympics… D’oh!!

The good news is that news has been cropping up here and there about Apple’s efforts to update the Mac Mini. Rumors had swirled that the line of ultracompact, inexpensive, entry-level Mac desktops may be discontinued, especially after Apple ceased making additional shipments to retailers. However, given the current financial concerns, it would be surprising indeed if Apple discontinued its most inexpensive model, especially when it enjoys a relative degree of popularity. Given that yours truly is currently pressed for space and running a laptop that’s over three years old, I’ll be all over an updated Mini the moment it hits the shelves. Help me out here, Apple!