WOW (Wide Open West) HD

WOW! Cable, Internet, and Phone should be added to the list.
They are in 4 states check em out at wowway.com
New High Definition Channel lineup:
201 CBS HD
203 NBC HD
204 The CW HD
205 PBS HD
206 ABC HD
208 FOX HD
209 TNT HD
211 ESPN HD
215 NFL Network HD+
216 HGTV HD
217 Food Network HD
218 A&E HD
219 Big Ten Network HD
220 FSN Ohio HD
221 Sports Time Ohio HD
222 ESPN2 HD
225 Discovery HD
226 Animal Planet HD
227 TLC HD
228 National Geographic HD
231 FX HD
248 Fox News HD
249 History Channel HD
254 ABC Family HD
255 Disney Channel HD
410 HBO HD**
449 SHO HD**
471 MAX HD**
493 Starz HD+
Digital Cable (Basic or Value) and additional monthly subscription required to receive WOW! HD channels. Channels not sold individually.
** Must subscribe to corresponding premium service
+ Digital Basic and HD service required to receive

High Definition Pak
210 HD Theater
212 HDNet
213 HDNet Movies
214 Wealth TV HD
Digital Cable (Basic or Value) and WOW! HD service required to receive WOW! HD Pak at additional monthly charge. Channels not sold individually.

I've had WOW in cleveland for the past year. they have been steadily increasing their HD programming. They even increased the internet speeds... oddly enough, it came with a rate drop. I was recently tempted by U-verse in my area and signed up for a trial run with it. Sure U-verse has about 3x the HD channels but #1 - they're on channels I don't watch #2 - They look like crap. It took about 4 days for me to cancel U-verse and come crawling back to WOW. And they took me back with a free year of HBO. I recommend WOW if it's in your area.

Ken do you (or anyone else) have a table for direct QUAM tuning for WOW in Detroit/Canton?

Here's the backstory... Used to have an Insignia 26" bought Thanksgiving 06 for $400. It died last month and bought a Samsung 26B360 to replace it. No more insignia branded stuff- I've got a policy, if it fails, it's off the list for any future consideration for anything else.

I use it for the bedroom and the real reason is that it fits in my camping trailer opening for a TV. I chose a Samsung replacement as most people say Samsung has a more sensitive OTA tuner.. Otherwise the Samsung is way better at picture than the crappy insignia ever was.. You get what you pay for..

Anyway when it's at home I do a direct connect to the RG6 cable feed and have it search for channels, Right now the Samsung pulls in the basics. Just got it so I need to hook up my son's school powered HD Rabbit ear antenna to see what I can get and how good it looks. Just wondering if I'm getting all the channels I can pullin. I will post a list of direct tune cable channels that it gets later.

I'm pulling the trailer in for camping prep and will hook up a Wineguard Wingman Yagi director set to the campers' Wineguard Sensar antenna to see if it helps with signal strength...

I've enjoyed WOW, with the following exceptions...

Versus. I'm a hockey nut, so during the playoffs, when a game was shown on Versus I had to leave my home to see it in HD, which meant watching it on Comcast!

Fox Soccer Channel. This disappeared!!! I hear there was some disagreement between WOW and Fox, but SORT IT OUT!! Comcast has!

I don't want to go back to Comcast, but I might have to soon if the above issues are not sorted...

http://content.wowway.com/documents/...lumbusPTCL.pdf

This is Columbus' WOW Channel Line Ups.

Early this week, after nine years with Comcast as my cable provider, I switched to WOW, the regional cable company, for my phone, internet and cable service, also dropping AT&T in the process.

After enjoying WOW for about four days now, I felt compelled to put in a plug for them and encourage anyone with access to WOW to give the company strong consideration.

For HD picture quality: My Comcast picture quality was very good, nearly as good as OTA. After setting my WOW HDDVR to make sure it was passing through 1080i, WOW hd picture quality is a dead-on match for my Comcast service.

For cost savings: my WOW monthly price for the complete package of services is only five dollars more than I was paying for Comcast cable alone. That's for a package that includes an HDDVR, one HD and one digital tuner, a wireless gateway and a few more goodies. They guaranteed that price until January, 2014. That's right: 2014. My Comcast package only included an HDDVR(an excellent one) and a couple of digital adapters. The net net? I'll save between eighty and ninety dollars every month for the next twenty eight months without sacrificing anything in terms of picture quality or overall performance.

Please keep this endorsement and mini-review in mind if WOW is available in your area. Here in southeast Michigan anyway, WOW is a very capable performer and one hell of a value.

I don't see why anyone would want Comcast/AT&T's expensive bandwidth-capped Internet connections and over-compressed, crippled multichannel video service.

WOW! has a decent HD channel lineup (around 100) that even has some rare channels like Sprout HD and Oxygen HD. I believe they don't add extra compression like Comcast either.

You can see they service the Chicago area, portions of Ohio, and Michigan:
http://www.wowway.com/cable-tv-service/channel-lineups/

I think many people are simply unaware they have a "second" cable provider in their area since cable overbuilders are so uncommon in the United States. So they end up throwing away money to the horrible giant companies like Comcast.

You can see they have top-notch reviews on Broadband Reports too.

I don't think this is true anymore since WOW! started their digital only transition this year.

Here's what the QAM packings look like in Dearborn Heights, Michigan currently:
http://pastebin.com/ZFhjak93

Now as you can see, most QAM256 frequency have no more than 2 HD channels on it. Some do have 2 HD channels and one or two SD ones. I don't see any with more than 3 HD channels. And looking at the ones with 3 HD on a QAM, they're the channels that are natively ~13 Mbps bitrate. They're the same lower bitrate on Verizon FiOS too.

This leads me to believe that WOW is probably not re-compressing any MPEG-2 feeds the networks send them, as they have no reason to unless they are sent to them as native MPEG-4. WOW! still has lots of free QAM space.

Because in many cases, they're cheaper and faster. WOW can kiss my ass.

I have relatives with WOW HD service, and the HD PQ has never been awful enough to indicate that they've packed in the channels that tightly. Before the recent analog reduction, they didn't even have enough HD channels for such tight packing to make sense.

I'm not really sure how you can say that Comcast is cheaper and "faster" when their 250 GB bandwidth cap effectively limits you to using your connection speed at an average rate of under 1 Mbps for the entire month. It is like having a Ferrari and only being allowed to drive it down the block.

50 Mbps isn't so special when you find out you can hit your monthly bandwidth cap by actually using that full speed in just under 12 hours. Meanwhile on WOW!'s 15 Mbps package with no monthly bandwidth caps, you effectively get 15x as much bandwidth as any of Comcast's speed tiers. You can transfer more data in one month on a WOW! 15 Mbps connection than Comcast will allow you to in an entire year.

This same 250 gigabyte transfer limit applies to all of Comcast's speed tiers whether it's the 12 Mbps package or the 100 Mbps package. This effectively makes anything faster than WOW!'s top speeds useless.

That's nice, but the fact is I've never come close to 250 GB. So the bandwidth cap is totally irrelevant to me, and Comcast wins on both speed and price. Comcast is by far the better choice for me.

Okay.

We'll see what happens in five years when that same cap is still there and the Internet requires more bandwidth than ever though. It's already been the same 250 GB for the past 3 years.

I just wish some people wouldn't be so shortsighted. Supporting ISPs that have bandwidth caps and when they have uncapped options available to them is why companies like Netflix won't increase the bitrates on their streaming video. It encourages the pervasiveness of bandwidth caps and stifles innovation of Internet delivered enhanced audio and video fidelity.

I just wish some people would understand that everyone has different views on things like this. You hate Comcast, I'm sure everyone here understands that. I happen to be extremely happy with my service, and I'm not going to give it up because of a cap that I've never even come close to reaching.

Why no CSN Chicago + HD?
They have FSN Detroit + HD.

Hmm... I wonder why WOW wouldn't carry Comcast SportsNet... hmm...

They do carry the channel, just not the HD version of CSN+. They carry a bunch of other Comcast-owned channels too.

Comcast probably charges extra for the HD feed. Or they're just suffering from the same kind of incompetence the other cable/satellite companies in the United States are. There is not a single provider that is not missing over 50 HD networks. Most of them are missing at least 80.

Not being able to acquire all the channels and having to play musical provider is another thing that is killing multichannel video.

comcast only owns 20% of CSN Chicago any ways and Directv, ATT, Dish (some times do to there part time HD on all RSN's) have it.