I haven’t had cable since 1996, and I am very satisfied with Dish satellite. I have an HD DVR I would hate to live without, and in all that time I think I’ve had less than 5 hours outage. Sure, there have been occasional problems, but for the most part I’m content.
However, we just bought a house, and I am weighing all options on our new utilities. So far I had decided that Comcast gave me the best bundle on phone and broadband (which I don’t have now), and I am pretty sure I am going to stick with Dish for TV. I had planned to sign up for the new account in my husband’s name (since you don’t get any advantage for being a loyal customer but lots of offers to lure new customers), but now Comcast has tossed a bone that I may not want to resist. For new customers (until August 17) purchasing the triple bundle of TV, Internet and Phone, they are giving away a Wii! I have never had a video game system, but I’ve been increasingly curious, especially having talked to other old farts that have played with it. So I’m counting on Dopers to help me decide - is it worth changing to cable, or is Comcast some sort of Evil Overlord I should not succumb to?
I saw your location was in the Pacific Northwest and I figured I’d throw out another option. If you are around the Seattle or Portland area you might be able to get Verizon’s fiber optic service FIOS. At the moment, they just offer voice and data, but they are hinting at doing TV content over it this fall with the promise of “zillions” of HD networks. Now, a real fiber optic network can definitely deliver more HD programming… if you care about HD EPSN8 is another matter. I also think Verizon is an Evil Overlord type company (I switched to Vonage just to drop Verizon land lines), but if the quality of HD TV they are promising is at a competitive price to an equivalent Comcast package, I am going to at least look into it.
I have Comcast cable and have had very few issues with them. When I have had problems, they were easily resolved, usually with a phone call. No significant outages that I can recall for several years. I have their HD DVR and like it fine.
I don’t use Comcast for internet service (I have DSL) and the only person I know who has had their phone service is my mother. In her case, she needed to switch back to AT&T after a few months because they could never make it work properly, but that’s just one person’s experience.
My husband and I had Dish for a year or so, and then switched to cable (Charter, here) because of a great rate they were offering. Our picture quality was far superior with Dish; however, every time we had a storm, it went out while the wind was blowing. Dish didn’t jack us around with the rates; they told us what it was going to be, and it was.
Charter, on the other hand, would give us a “special rate” for a certain period of time, and we’d have to call every few months to get the current rate. And if we missed calling, we were screwed. When we signed up for the bundled internet, cable & telephone, we were supposed to have the $99 for one year rate, but we got that for one month before they shot it back up again. Their customer service was THE WORST, and that’s no exaggeration.
I don’t have any experience with Comcast, but if they’re anything like Charter, I’d strongly urge you to stick with Dish. We finally gave up and got rid of Charter for everything except internet, since my husband’s employer reimburses the internet. That plus Netflix takes care of us.
I’d try them out. I had Dishnetwork for TV back in California, and wasn’t too happy with Comcast for TV (DVRs weren’t part of the package, and DVRs are sweet), but kept them for internet.
People bitch about Comcast a lot but in my experience, they’re usually the best deal in town for broadband internet, and their outages don’t strike me as more frequent than other local services that charge more for the speed. Comcast seems to be quietly, incrementally increasing their speed.
We have Comcast cable broadband internet and TV now, and the service is pretty good. We’re in Colorado Springs at the moment.
I had checked a couple months ago, but I used your link to check again. Sadly, no service where I’m moving. But at the end of two years, when I can change service without penalty, I’ll look into this again.
I think we’ll go with Comcast after all, albeit with some small trepidation. They really do have the best price - I’ll actually be paying a lot less for utilities and getting a lot more. One good thing about DVRs (and there are oh, so many) is that if there’s a signal interruption, I can look at pre-recorded stuff. Also, I can try and hook up my DVD recorder again and record the stuff I DVR, since Comcast’s HD capacity at 15 hours is half of Dish’s, and I tend to hoard recorded stuff for a while. Hey, wait - with On Demand I won’t need to do that anymore, will I? Sweet!
Thanks, everyone!
I had DISH for a while but the inclimate weather outages just pissed me off one too many times. Trudge home from work in a blizzard and what do you want to do? Curl up in front of the boob tube for the night. Oh that’s right, heavy snow blocks your signal.
I also missed the LOST season finale two years in a row because we had thunderstorms on those nights.
I did like their DVR though. It ran trouble free.
Now I have Comcast which is trouble free. HOWEVER, their motorola HD DVR is the biggest piece of crap. I’ve had it replaced 3 times. Doesn’t matter. They were a designed piece of crap. I’ve found online forums about them and everyone had the same problems. It’s something you just have to live with I guess.