I just want to make sure I have access to at least one of them.

It's possible to loose just one or both, just depending on what problems the provider is having. I have a friend right now who has AT&T Uverse and he's without TV, phone, and Internet due to some problem in his area.

Jane, it can very every outage depending on the cause of the outage. Storms that take down a line will take down both generally. And internal issues is normally one service. Its impossible to have guaranteed service, especially in storms. I will say, in my old house where lines were above ground, I had more outages than I do now with buried cables. If the cables in your neighborhood are buried, then you’ll likely have a better track record and fewer outages. I would say that on average, we get 1-2 outages per year. My xfinity account app tells me what services are affected and an eta on resolution. They are vague times, but it lets me know they’re aware of it and working on it.

Looks like I may choose to keep my internet on cable and my tv on satellite. The thought of being without one or the other simultaneously is definitely not what I want to happen! Thanks all for your input.

Do you have OTA available?

I have Dish Sat for TV and Infiniti for www.

Ny time you have BOTH services delivered to the house by ONE cable, there is clearly a risk of a loss of both.

If I were to lose both Sat and also cable www, I still can watch local Over The Air TV stations from my Chimney Antenna.

Are you in an area that has a lot of extreme weather?

I have Dish for TV and it's never once gone out. Not once. I'm in a mild weather area, though.

I have cable internet (Comcast) and it's been out once in maybe 10 years. One morning it was out. As I left the house and drove down the street, there was a guy in a cherry picker working on the equipment on a pole. I asked what happened and he said the hardware had failed but it would be fixed in 30 minutes. That was it.

We don't have access to cable in the country. Re DirecTV: we have medium storms and difficult weather here, but the storms are bad enough to block the Sat signal for an hour plus or minus several times a year. We can switch to local network channels during those disruptions. Of course, we also lose power two or three times a year as well, and that takes almost everything out. I suppose that a battery driven laptop could be directly hooked to an ethernet port to Cable if an ethernet port was provided.

Ethernet ports connect to equipment that also requires power. Only way to get by that is a generator or ups.