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

[superchkn]

I don't know about Tivo, but I once worked for a national store that sold DirecTV units. We were told by the DirecTV people that they often detected pirated units by them calling from an unauthorized number, or not calling at all. Now obviously they also knew which machines had hacked (or stolen) cards somehow and they would somehow disable those machines (sounded like some sort of bad BIOS flash from what the DirecTV representatives said). They asked us to be sure to tell the customers that the units NEEDED to be plugged in.

I was skeptical of their ability to do this, but we did have a person try to return a dead unit shortly thereafter and we knew he had been trying to purchase units from us so he could steal the cards and then return them when our electronics associates were at lunch or off.

But that was several years ago already... Still, if it was me, I'd give them a call just to be sure.

You don't need a network card

[Yeechang Lee]

I presume that you have a Series 1 TiVo given the 9thtee card. So do I, but since I don't need anything more than daily updates, I use a serial cable to hook mine up to my Linux box (Windows boxes work too). Not bad for $5.

Use your cell phone

[zelphior]

It's pretty easy to set up your cell phone to have TiVo call through it. Just get an adaptor for your cell phone. I've seen adaptors that allow you to plug your cell phone into a laptop modem, and use it to dial up. Just plug the phone cord out from the TiVo and into the cell phone adaptor, then use that to make short calls to update your tv guide or whatever. Don't know if it would work for sure (never tried it myself), but it's worth a shot. My phone came with an adaptor that plugs into the mini jack I plug my earplug into, and has a standard phone jack on the other side. I'd imagine you could get such a device at radio shack or something.

Re:Use your cell phone

[dave1g]

Isn't that nearly impossible?

Modems use analog. Cell phones are digital.

You can't run a normal modem through any type of cell phone adapter as far as I know.

Much bigger problem

[alazar]

I guess you haven't tried to get any credit (cards or otherwise) since you went cellular only. A friend just went through this problem. The "great" USA Patriot Act has made it illegal for companies issuing credit to do so for anyone who does not have a landline telephone number.

That said - I cannot find it explicitly in the act , after a quick review. (EPIC.org). But it may be that I missed it, or that the details are in some resulting regulation, or that that is the interpretation of the credit issuer.

My buddy was trying to buy furniture, and got turned down even tho he has an excellent credit record. After doing the digging the credit issuer told him that they could not issue because he gave them only a mobile phone number.

I'd love to hear about your experience should you apply for new credit.

Re:Much bigger problem

[lizrd]

I've purchased a house, car and opened a new credit card account in the last year. It's been almost three years since I dropped my land line.

I do run into problems every once in a while. Domino's won't deliver without a regular phone # on caller ID, so I order from Papa John's when I'm too lazy to pick up pizza from some place good. I was turned down for credit once at a Jewelry store because of the lack of home phone thing. I went across the mall to another store and made my purchase there instead.