How does that solve the issue? You still need an ISP. Am I missing something?
I've been thinking about DirectTV now as well... My issue is do I trust Spectrum internet enough. I have so much on wifi now, do I trust adding more?
The issue is whether you're talking about incoming bandwidth to the house/router or Wifi bandwidth. Entropy originally mentioned wifi rather than the actual broadband speed.
Companies like Spectrum like to use scare tactics if you're talking about cutting the cord, like "well you better sign up to the ultra-premiere superfast internet package or you'll have buffering problems." But it's not true. Typical HD streaming is only about 5 Mbps. UHD/4K streaming is a bit more, maybe 15-20 Mbps. The "Ultimate" plan here is 300 Mbps download. But for the average person, having anything north of 40-50 Mbps download is fine, and you can get by with a little less if you don't expect to stream UHD. All those other devices [PC's, cell phones, etc] take MUCH less bandwidth typically unless you're heavily downloading something or doing tons of online gaming.
The other question, of course, is related to Wifi. This can sometimes be difficult because cable companies tend to try to keep equipment in service for very long times. So sometimes you can get stuck with older technologies. I doubt much stuff out there is 802.11b (11 Mbps) anymore, but there may be some that is 802.11g (54 Mbps), and if you're using wireless to stream to 4-5 TV's in a house, you could potentially have issues. You'd want 802.11n (600 Mbps) or newer. Of course, there's a simple solution for that. Buy your own 802.11ac router, plug the Cat5 from your cable modem into the wifi router, and you're good to go. That's what I did and I basically disabled the wifi in the supplied router. When I move, I'm actually going to drop their cable modem entirely and buy my own, since I already have the router. You end up saving money a lot of times doing that, because you pay a monthly equipment rental charge on your cable modem/router.
The other solution is that if you're worried about wifi bandwidth specifically, as mentioned, but don't want to buy a separate Wifi router, just go Cat5 from your router to your *main* TV, the one that will be most likely to do UHD streaming, and then that won't interfere with your other wifi devices. So that's where the recommendation to just use Cat5 comes from. If it's a wifi bandwidth issue, it's solved by avoiding the wifi.
this was to solve the overloaded WiFi issue
I have so much on wifi now, do I trust adding more?
