What is Spectrum? Charter Spectrum, or simply Spectrum, is a new name to many parts of the country. Spectrum is the brand name for cable, Internet and phone service from Charter Communications.
Although Charter started using the Spectrum name prior to its merger, the name Spectrum gained prominence as a result of the second, fourth, and sixth-largest cable operators in the United States merging in 2016. Post-merger Charter is now a Fortune 100 company.
Was Time Warner Cable or Charter Spectrum bought by AT&T? No it wasn’t, but I understand why some people are thinking that right now. It now turns out that both Charter Communications and AT&T have a history with Time Warner, but it’s complicated.
That said, there was a rumor that AT&T’s arch rival Verizon is considering buying Charter Communications, the company behind Spectrum. Meanwhile, AT&T did buy Time Warner. Time Warner differs from Time Warner Cable.
Friday night, I took my wife out to get some coffee to get her a few minutes away from the house. There’s a corner in the front of the store next to the window that we always sit in, and it seems like some huckster is always huckstering something there.
And did we ever find a doozie on this Friday night.
Read More »How long do you think it takes to have a conversation you don’t wanna have?
I haven’t received a fake Windows tech support call in a very long time. A couple of the operations doing this have been shut down, but based on the continued popularity of the things I’ve written about them, I wonder if some people are still getting them.
That makes me reluctant to block them, just in case they call me again, but if you’re getting those calls and want them to stop, I can tell you how to do that.
Read More »How to ensure you never get another Windows tech support scam call again
Cnet questioned the motives of cable operators this week when it comes to offering truly high-speed Internet.
Cable operators argue that the demand for those high speeds isn’t there. It’s not gigabit that consumers oppose nearly so much as paying more than $100 a month just for Internet. The problem is that by the time you pay for super high-speed Internet, cable, and a couple of cell phones, you can easily spend $300 a month, if not more, and that’s the price of a car.
We’re still coming out of a recession, and a lot of people are still trying to get their heads above water after the excesses of the previous decade. But if prices are within reach, people are willing to buy, after a half-decade of austerity.
John C Dvorak is raving in PC Magazine about Netgear wireless routers and range extenders and how easy WPS makes it to set them up–and providing some very seriously flawed security advice along the way.
“Note that WPS is crackable by serious hackers using brute-force attack, but any SOHO user not dealing with government secrets should be fine.”
Read More »No, it doesn’t take a “serious hacker” to crack wi-fi through WPS
Now here’s a potentially huge money-saver. I still have phone service through AT&T that rings through old-fashioned phones (you know, like the kind you see in a museum) because there’s nobody that’s going to give me a wireless plan with unlimited minutes for about 30 bucks a month.
But, still, that’s $360 a year. I’m sure there are things I’d rather do with $360 a year if I could free that up, right?
What if I were to tell you that you could buy a device that costs less than $100 (potentially as little as $38) and you could make phone calls for free using your Internet connection?
Read More »How to ditch your landline and your phone bill but still have phones that work
Software developer, author, and blogger Jeff Atwood wrote his confessions of the 1980s this week. As a teenager and not-quite-adult, he was a phone phreaker.
More of this went on than anyone wants to admit. Rob O’Hara has podcasted about it.Read More »Busted at the Safeway for phone phreaking
As I wrote earlier this week, I’m a new AT&T U-Verse customer. Prior to that, I was using old-school POTS with a DSL connection. Between the phone service, DSL, and long-distance calls, I was spending around $75 a month. So it looked like I could switch to U-Verse with the 250-minute voice plan and 3-megabit Internet, save some money, and get a bit of an upgrade in connection speed.
I was mostly correct.
Dvorak was in rare form this week, as he writes something that reads more like an e-mail virus alert chain letter. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376702,00.asp
Read on for the money quote.