A couple months ago I started researching different ways that we could replace our current TV setup. We were subscribed to our cable company’s top cable package with HD channels, PVR, and hundreds of channels we never watched. Essentially we were paying $80 a month to record TV shows that we would watch days or even weeks later,  and watch old re-runs that we had seen dozens of times that we put on as background noise when there was “nothing on”. The PVR was a total disaster even when it did work properly, which it rarely did. If you set the PVR to record “Lost” on ABC’s HD channel, the next week it would be listed as “Lost HD” or “Lost HD (5.1)” and wouldn’t get recorded due to the variation in the listing name.  I won’t even get into the abysmal user interface that the team at work analyzed in great detail in the Teehan+Lax PVR Report.  We were paying almost $1000 a year to watch old reruns of Friends and use an unreliable, out-of-date, and terribly clunky piece hardware/software to record our favourite TV shows. This was totally ridiculous.

A couple months ago I was looking at our phone bill and realized that we were paying 3 phones bills for 2 people that hardly ever use the phone. Something about this wasn’t adding up right. We tried to think of a valid reason why we needed to keep the $30 a month landline when we both have cell phones. We couldn’t come up with any, except for the fact that sometimes we just don’t hear our cell phones at home. Sometimes I’ll be upstairs and my cell phone will be on vibrate downstairs, or we’ll be watching TV and we forgot our cell phone in our jacket pocket downstairs. This reason alone kept us tied to our landline. The only solution we could think of would be some sort of bluetooth ringer that would ring with our cell phones, this idea lead us to find the XLink Bluetooth Gateway.