Question on Cable (Houston, College Station, Spring: how much, house, to buy)

[jflores]

We are looking to buy a house but its not cable ready. Does anyone know how much it would cost to have the cable company (comcast) run wires in three bedrooms and one living room?? any guesstimates would be appreciated.

[EasilyAmused]

I get an independant contractor to run cat 5 where it needs to go. Don't pay the Comcast or any provider to do it.
I know Direct TV actually refuses now to do anything other than drop the line into your attic. When pressed they quote something like 180 a room on the second floor and they wouldn't do the first floor. Craziness. They've gotten spoiled by all the new construction that is "ready" to go. I happend to be lucky that my General Contractor was there the day Direct TV refused to do it.

[Topaz]

I think with Direct TV it totally depends on the contractor they've chosen for a particular area. They did a herculean amount of work to install our Direct TV in Portland. Lots of drilling holes and running lines everywhere. It took five hours.

[tstone]

Cable could be expensive. They may have to dig a trench to run the cables from the box in your yard (or your neighbor's), lay the wire, wire the outside of the house, then wire the inside.

Dish is wireless all the way up to the roof, then it gets messy. But if you sign a contract the install for DirecTV should be free. There aren't any caveats on the DirecTV website regarding this. Just says ''FREE installation for up to 4 rooms.'' So maybe you can get them to come out to the house, and if they refuse to install then you might be able to cancel the contract since they didn't hold up their end of the deal. Just read the fine print.

If you're a handyman/woman and have a free Saturday, I suppose you could design & tackle this yourself. Your attic should be cool enough to work out of comfortably (right now anyway).

[Beto]

Expensive.

[jfre81]

You're between a rock and a hard place.

Making the house cable-ready is not going to be cheap, and dish/satellite just doesn't cut it for me anyway, not here at least. It's one thing having a dish in, say, SoCal and having one here where it's often cloudy, making you pay a lot of money for bad reception.

[tstone]

Originally Posted by jfre81

It's one thing having a dish in, say, SoCal and having one here where it's often cloudy, making you pay a lot of money for bad reception.

Interesting. I hear this sometimes from others, too. Personally I have never had a problem with my dish in College Station or Houston. Clouds & rain don't do anything. Lightning will take it out for several minutes, though. After installation I did have to go in and tweak the transponder settings once, though.

[EasilyAmused]

Um, I have Direct TV, HD mothership dish, and I've only lost signal once for 3 minutes during a major downpour.

[jfre81]

My father-in-law living in NC, where it clouds (if not rains, at least not lately) a lot, and he seems to lose his signal a lot. Could he just have a bad installation or something? I've never personally had satellite in my place, so if you have a good experience with it, ignore me

[Topaz]

We've had Direct TV in Seattle, Portland, and Colorado Springs. We've had terrific reception in all of those places, even during wind storms, rain, and blizzards.

We've also had very good customer service from both Comcast and Direct TV, surprisingly enough!

Hopefully that will continue to be the case in Houston when we get there.