TiVo and DirecTV in a Cellular-Only Household?

Balthisar asks: "Like so many others, my wife and I have recently made the move to pure mobile telephone use, and have disconnected the landline permanently. Today, I turned on the TiVo and received a stern warning that only three days of the program guide remained! I screwed up. Anyone have a good emergency way of refreshing the program guide while I wait for my TiVo networking card to come in? An additional concern is DirecTV: I never use Pay Per View, but it's not connected, either. Any horror stories about not having your DirecTV connected to a phone line? If you don't have any advice, at least take this as a cautionary tale to make a good checklist before taking the leap of eliminating your terrestrial line!" This topic was handled in a previous article over 2 years ago. What suggestions do you have for others, that find themselves in this position?

Comments

DirecTV does not require a phone line

[jcwren]

DirecTV does not require a phone line, unless you use pay-per-view options. It gets the program guide updates over the air. If your phone has an accessory to provide dial tone, you'd be able to use that to allow it to phone home. However, you'll probably have to tell them about the phone number, as they don't seem to like units reporting in from the phone number that's not associated with the account.

As you've figured out, TiVo gets its updates over the phone line. If you have an integrated TiVo/DirectTV receiver, I'm not sure what happens in that case. I've got the original, and it can only do it over the phone line (not including network mods).

Re:DirecTV does not require a phone line

[reaper20]

I have a Directivo, and after one of the 3.x updates the need for the phone line went away. It will complain occassionally that it hasn't phoned in, but mine has been working flawlessly without a phone line for months.

Direct Tivo reports 175 days since I've dialed up.

[robdeadtech]

It's not a problem. You'll get a warning every time you press your tivo button that says something like "It's been 175 days since you've dialed up" but unless you want to do pay-per-view it simply doesn't matter. At least it hasn't mattered to me. The Direct Tivo sends programming data to you machine via the satellite.

usb adapter

[Nutcase]

I have a tivo and am cellular only. I took it to a friend's house, left it overnight to update, and brought it home. I have hooked up a usb->ethernet adapter, and run it through a router to my broadband connection. The latest tivo software (downloaded while it was hooked up overnight at my friends) supports usb ethernet natively.

It works perfectly, with the only hassle being that initial setup.

Directv was NOT connected

[vandalman]

I had mine disconnected for a while and I slowly lost programing I paid for. I ended up having to call tech support, they said that it needed to be connected to verify the card was still in use.