Arris Gateway and Portals being discontinued in Winnipeg

[Kritiker]

My current ValuPlan expires in April and I am being told that my (owned) Arris TV Gateway and 4 portals will no longer be supported by the plans being made available to me. I can only continue to use them on a month to month basis.

The last time I checked I could find no online announcement of this retirement and I have not yet had such an announcement on my bill.

I am surprised and disappointed by this apparent move. It isn't completely unexpected, I suppose but I thought I might get 2 more years out of the hardware.

Does anyone have any more info about this?

[rstra]

@Kritiker The Arris Gateway retirement is in progress. More info here:

https://support.shaw.ca/t5/tv-articles/about-legacy-tv-box-upgrade-program/ta-p/9242#content-section...

[Kritiker]

Yep but 

These boxes cannot be re-activated or moved from one account to another.

---

but nothing about not continuing on an existing account and no date has been specified.

Also, was this info available last week? That's the last time I had checked and I didn't think I saw this then.

[Kritiker]

Well now, it's been a long journey from home.com to shaw.ca, then to Rogers, now to ???

We are all streaming more, watching cable less, needing Internet more. I have always liked the Shaw TV offering better than the competition. The Arris Gateway system I now have is what kept me at Shaw in recent years. Without that, I have to re-evaluate everything, sooner than I had intended:

TV: streaming plus over the air, or current offerings from MTS or Shaw?
Internet: pretty much Bell MTS 500Gb/s up and down. Shaw is finally providing 150 Mb/s up but still less than I want. 

It looks very much like my time here is coming to an end. We'll see.

I've very much enjoyed the discussions on the various iterations of this community that have come before and appreciated the help, a lot of it, that I've received. I've, in the past, been able to provide a little bit of help too. My current label may be "Grasshopper" but I've been around.

Sorry if I've rambled a bit.

Thanks to all!!

[mdk]

@Kritiker -- as @rstra referenced, those boxes were being "retired" in March 2023 "in select areas of Vancouver, Calgary & Edmonton".  It seems that Winnipeg is the next area to roll-out the newer boxes.

Via: https://support.shaw.ca/t5/service-updates-outages/tkb-p/service-updates/label-name/manitoba

Currently, I do not see any mention about it for Shaw customers in Manitoba.

Note that Shaw writes that they will replace your current box, at no extra cost to you -- no need to switch to any other provider (Rogers, Bell, any reseller).

[Kritiker]

I own my Gateway and 4 Portals. I have been told that I would have to switch to rental units. And the experience would change, not necessarily for the better. I would have like to have continued with the Gateway for another few years, but time doesn't stand still.

All this does is force us to reconsider our TV viewing habits earlier than expected. I had long preferred Shaw's TV offering to the competition's so Shaw's "modernizing" that means we are now free to consider switching to a competitor or even dropping "cable" TV altogether. I have just ordered an OTA antenna, for the first time in, well, forever. I have also ordered Bell MTS 500up/down Internet. That makes staying with Shaw for TV more difficult (but not yet impossible). A flex channel package that one rep mentioned may no longer be available. I don't yet know. We are still considering.

[rstra]

@Kritiker  The gateway box did have the pause and surf feature that was very popular, and it is quite reliable, so I can see why you would be disappointed that it is going away. Since you ordered Bell, you won’t be going for a valueplan with Rogers, but you could just order limited TV, add theme packs and go month to month and see if that would allow you to keep using the gateway. 

@mdk  The link I provided for the cable boxes being retired doesn’t indicate a date or locations, it just says “in progress.” Rogers has also added the XG1’s to the list with a date TBD.

[Kritiker]

Nothing is yet a completely done deal. I have until April to figure all this out. I am going to run the Bell MTS Internet in parallel, for a short while and I can cancel if I am unhappy with it at very low cost. And yes, the Limited TV (as Shaw/Rogers is now calling it) and some options, month to month, might work..but of course, at least so far, I cannot see online what the options cost or what channels are included in the grandfathered version that I would get with the old hardware. I’ll drill down some more and I am still expecting a call back from retention. I think it may be a viable option. I’ll also need to find out exactly which channels I would get..the online channel listings are for the Ignite versions of the packages and the version I would get/retain is likely different. E.g., BBC First is included in the current Ignite Total TV but not in the version of Total TV that I currently get. 

Really, being forced to re—evaluate isn’t a bad thing. My Gateway has been shut down for several months now due to some construction and my tardiness in reconnecting it and we’ve barely missed it, using a variety of streaming options instead. And if I am willing to stream, and I am, I am unable to explain my reluctance to give up my wired TV boxes..just too inflexible , I suppose. 😉 I do want access to local and US networks, PBS, CBC and CTV news channels and maybe CNN, BNN Bloomberg, TSN and Sportsnet (both for curling). Once we figure out what we want to watch, we’ll be in a better position to determine how to watch it.

and yes, @rstra the disappearance of the pause and search is a major factor in my thinking. I rarely watch anything live. I record it first and then fast forward past the commercials. I am worried I’ll lose that ability. Also, I recorded many hours of Graham Norton (among other programs) and have canceled BBC First because there was little new available. With the Gateway I can (could) watch those at my leisure even after canceling the subscription. Not so with Ignite. Also, I have a 3GB HDD attached to the Gateway. The connection is somewhat unreliable but it usually works. I am also wondering if I can watch my recorded programs on the Gateway and the attached HDD without a live cable connection. I’ll try that out once I reconnect it to the rest of my system.

Also, @mdk, the hardware retirement process seems to be an extended one and might almost be described as patchwork, faster there than here etc., e.g., faster in Alberta than in Manitoba.

[mdk]

> The link I provided for the cable boxes being retired ... just says “in progress".

That's a firm grasp of the obvious. 🙂

[mdk]

@Kritiker -- a few responses:

1. See: https://www.shaw.ca/tv/limited-tv for the channel line-up for Limited TV.
2. CBC and CTV news channels, CNN, BNN Bloomberg, TSN and Sportsnet -- are not included in Limited TV. If you are close to a PBS station just over the USA border,  i.e., within "over-the-air" reception range, it might be available on Limited TV.
3. if you are wondering if I can watch my recorded programs on the Gateway and the attached HDD without a live cable connection, just disconnect the coaxial-cable from the Gateway, and do the experiment.
4. on the BlueCurve system, press "record" and then switch to a different channel. Watch it, press "record" on that channel, and then switch back to the first channel, to view what you did not see after the first switch.
5. patchwork -- on the IBM mainframe, when the Wheeler Scheduler was choosing which process was to be the next to be dispatched, we called it "biggest turkey served last" -- heavy number-crunching programs were demoted to "Q3", and highly-interactive processes were promoted to "Q1", so that they could do what they needed within their time-slice, and "leftover" CPU resources were given to those tasks in "Q3". It seems that Shaw has been hitting the big cities (Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and now Winnipeg) before the "left-overs" -- the smaller markets.