About Bear

The short version

Bear has 44 years in cable television and residential AV. He started as a technician at Cable TV Arlington in 1982 — back when most American households didn't even have cable yet — and worked his way up to VP of Operations. He spent a decade on the trucks and in the headend, wiring neighborhoods across Northern Virginia and the DC suburbs and building the cable infrastructure the DMV still runs on today.

In 1992 he struck out on his own and founded Silver Bullet, a regional install and service contractor. He grew it to over 100 technicians across seven counties in the DMV. Over the course of his run, Bear personally oversaw well over a million successful installs and service calls. There isn't a cable scenario — pricing trick, channel-tier shuffle, retention-department dance, regional sports blackout, MoCA mess, install-day surprise — that he hasn't seen play out hundreds of times.

He transitioned to residential AV install full-time in 2012 when the old cable contracts wound down. He's been on the operations side ever since.

Why his perspective matters here

Most cord-cutting advice on the internet is written by tech reviewers who've never strung coax across a basement, never sat in a cable provider's quarterly retention review, never watched a route supervisor calculate how many trucks to send when a price hike triggers a wave of cancellations.

Bear has. He built the system today's families are leaving. He knows where the margin is, where the lock-in tricks come from, why your bill went up $24 in January, and which "$59.99 promo" turns into $185/month on month thirteen. He knows because he was the one telling the truck rolls where to go when those promos shipped.

That's the inside track Untangled gives you that a tech blog can't. Every recommendation about cable, every bill-audit logic, every "should I keep cable or cut?" call on this site gets sanity-checked against Bear's 44-year read on how the industry actually operates.

What Bear ran

• Cable TV Arlington — Technician → VP of Operations (1982–1992). Ten years building out coaxial cable infrastructure in Northern Virginia. Headend work, plant maintenance, neighborhood drops, the supervisor side of a couple thousand truck rolls per year.
• Silver Bullet — Founder & Operator (1992–2012). Built a 100-tech residential cable install and service contractor covering seven counties. Won and managed long-running contracts with the major cable operators in the DMV. Oversaw over a million completed installs and service calls.
• Residential AV Operations (2012–today). Joined the family residential AV business full-time when the old cable contracts wound down. Runs the back end: scheduling, warehouse, gear procurement, install logistics, field-team management. Rick stays in the field with clients; Bear keeps everything behind it moving.

The role on Untangled

Rick is the lead reviewer. Bear is the institutional memory and the cable-economics check.

When a guide talks about cable pricing, regional sports network carriage, what a "broadcast TV fee" really is, why the equipment rental line on your bill exists, or whether YouTube TV is genuinely cheaper than your current Xfinity package — Bear's read on the operator side is what makes the analysis sharp instead of generic.

Want to ask Bear a question?

Email: [email protected]

Bear reads the cable and bundling questions. If you've got a screenshot of a cable bill and want a no-pressure read on what's actually negotiable, send it.