What do part-timers do about TV/Internet?
 

We will be part-timers for awhile -- we expect to come up there maybe every month for an extended weekend and for a month or two during the summer. We are wondering what options other part time residents of TV use for internet and television service when visiting.

We rent our house Jan to April and we come for 2 weeks in May/June. We put our Comcast Service on Vacation mode after our visit in the summer. We then put it back on mid November, this saves us approx 5 months. We were at our place last September and had Cable TV service even when on vacation mode. Its kinda of nice to have no internet or cable TV once in a while.

Can't speak for Dish Network, but DirecTV does allow you to have a second "service location". They installed an antenna for us at our home in TV so all we have to do is bring our receivers with us when we come down, hook them up, call DirecTV to tell them to switch us over to our other service location, and voila - works like a charm. By making that phone call, we're able to get a ton of local channels from around central FL.

Nicest part is that it doesn't cost anything extra - no increase to our monthly invoice.

Bill :)

We do the same. If you like the TV channels up North you don't have to tell Direct TV that you are in Fla and you can keep the Northern channels. Our problem is that when we do that, coming from California all the programs are four hours different; so we make the change to Fla programs.

For Internet we use a Sprint Mobil Hotspot and take it with us on our travels.

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Thanks for the info. I checked the Dish Network on line information and they have a portable DVR that we can bring with us and get the same programming as at home with no additional monthly fee (other than buying the equipment) but...... it requires high speed internet access.

We travel around a bit so we went with the AT&T mobile hotspot and Comcast has an intro $10 per month for basic cable for the first year. Good enough for us, since we are spending most of the time out and having fun!

A question for DirecTV subscribers who travel with their receivers: is the capability to take a receiver and connect it to two different dishes only available if you register the receiver for both dishes? The reason I ask is that friends of ours have a vacation home in a beach community in Florida that they have given us the key to and told us we can use it any time that we want (they like having us go there and check it out for any problems).

The problem is that when we go there, there is no TV service turned on. They have recently subscribed to DirecTV for their fulltime house and after I told them about the possibility of taking their receiver with them when they visit their Florida house, they are considering adding a DirecTV dish there as well. If they do that, would that allow us to take our own DirecTV receiver with us and connect to their satelite dish when we go to stay at their house. If so, would it just work by plugging it in or does DirecTV have to get involved?

You have to contact DirecTV Mover's Connection service (1-888-DTV-MOVE) and have them set your friend's vacation home address up as an additional "Service Location" on your DirecTV account. It doesn't do anything to affect your normal billing. They might nix the whole thing, however, if they see that your friend already has that address set up on their account as well.

Bill :)