Yes, the Dish is Satan's sweaty ball sack and we're going to hell for choosing it.

The BBQ Pit
41

This is a misperception that seems universal. And again, I’m not going to defend the marketing (or operational) practices of any individual cable operators (even tho’ Comcast bought nearly a million bucks of my company’s services last year), but cable operators don’t really have a monopoly. Their franchise to provide services in a particular area, is granted by your local elected officials - city council, township trustees, county commissioners, etc. If only one cable company is serving your area, it is often because that’s what your local officials have permitted. In a recent thread here, I posted a whole crapload of data about cable overbuilds; I’m not gonna go look for all that stuff again, but it’s here somewhere.

And Comcast does not own Charter Communications. Comcast recently (2003) bought AT&T’s broadband operations, they & Time-Warner are currently in the process of cutting up swallowing Adelphia, but Comcast does not own Charter.

42

Heh. Don’t be too hasty:
Time Warner Cable and Comcast to Acquire Assets of Adelphia Communications

43

Do you have anything like speakers on either side of your receiver box? This crap happened to me and it turned out the remote’s UHF signal was bouncing between my speakers. So that might be it if you’re still having this problem after changing the remote signal.

44

The receiver’s in the den, and right now, it’s on the floor. We do have surround sound speakers set up in the living room, but there’s no receiver.

I’m not having any problem now since we updated the network address - so hopefully, it’ll all be good. Thanks for the suggestion, though - I’ll keep it in mind for the future in case it happens again.

E.

45

Just a quick item of note re: bad weather & Dish reception - Living here in South Florida, we’re coming up on The Rainy Season. It 'll pour, and I mean POUR for a couple of hours every afternoon for about a month to month and a half. As the storm is building, our satellite will lose the beam-feed. It’ll go out and stay out… until the storm is at it’s fever pitch! Then the signal will come in again, pretty as you please.
As for last year when we got our asses slapped by two hurricanes, the Dish was running smoothly until the power cut out, and was waiting for us when the power cut in again two days later. Some of my cow-orkers with cable were waiting up to two weeks for their service to be re-activated.
Hard to stop from snickering…

46

I’ve got Dish Network and so far am satisfied with it, but there are two things that trouble me.

  1. Laaaaaaag. I’ve got the DVR box, and flipping through the chanels is a chore; there is a delay of anywhere from two to ten seconds before the channel actually changes.

  2. Because I don’t have cable, I don’t have broadband through cable. Instead, I depend on SBC DSL, which has only about half the bandwidth/speed as cable broadband.

47

With digital cable some channels are still fuzzy because almost no cable provider gives you 100% digital channels with their digital package. Some channels are digital, some aren’t.

With satellite all channels are of digital quality.

I’ve had DirecTV for awhile now. Basically because once I got rid of cable internet in favor of DSL I had no reason to keep my shitty cable service. For over a decade I’ve had certain channels like TBS partially snowy, some of my favorite channels would become snowy and stay snowy for months on end.

I basically didn’t have TBS, a pretty major channel, for 10 years because it was so snowy.

I hated cable internet because it seemed to be affected too much by peak hour usage. I play a lot of online games around 6pm-10pm, peak usage times, lots of lag. Pretty fast at night though. With DSL I’m moving fast enough in these games now that I notice no lag, and it doesn’t vary based on what time it is.

I’m honestly not sure why anyone would get cable over DSL at this point, the variability in cable speed just really pisses me off. And while the maximum speed advertised for this DSL service is lower than the 1.5 mbits advertised with my cable internet the actual speed I get is typically a few 100k more with my DSL service.

Anyways, I’ve heard of some people getting ripped with satellite outages. But to me it wasn’t a big issue, mainly because I think I also have shitty electric service or something. If it’s a moderately large storm my power’s going out, so it’s a moot point if my satellite reception is gone or if my cable reception is still good.

Since I’ve had DirecTV I’ve had one outage while I was watching. This was when I had a monsoon come through and it rained so hard it looked like sheets of water were coming down. It was out for about 15 minutes, then came back.

I’ve not had a rate increase with DirecTV in probably over 3 years if I remember correctly.

48

Actually, if you have a digital package, then 100% of the chanels are digital. You can’t have both an analog and digital signal going into your TV’s input (you can, however, have one input be analog and anther digital, but that’s beside the point.) I think you might be confusing digital with HD. In that case, yse, you are correct, but that’s because not every station has an HD signal, so that’s hardly the cable’s company’s fault. And if a station has no HD signal at all, then it still won’t be HD with sattelite. Some channels being “snowed-out” are unfortunate, and I am confused as to why that would be, especially if it was actually digital.

Are you sure you had a digital service? You mention that TBS was basically gone for a decade, but digital cable hasn’t been around that long. If it was gone back in 1995, and you never upgraded to digital (which includes getting a digital receiver box, which you need,) then you were still getting the analog signal, which is quite suseptible to interference.

As to the internet, well, that varies from place to place, and how many users the compnay puts on a “block.” I lived for three years in a decent sized college town (60,000+ people), and the cable connection to my residence was shared by about 20 poeple, and that’s not couting whoever eklse was on our block, and it was jsut fine. But if yours was slow, then yeah, I can see how DSL could be faster. I’ve always had fast speeds with cable (and I play MMORPGs) so I’m sticking with it.

49

Well, we figured out why our channels kept changing on their own last week, and strangely enough, it gave us the opportunity to meet our new neighbors.

I was finishing up some work the next day when my doorbell rang. When I answered it, it turned out to be my next door neighbor. They’re a younger couple, like us, no kids, just pets. He introduced himself to me, and then said “Did you guys just get Dish Network?”.

When I said yes, he then asked “Were your channels changing on their own last night?”.

I immediately started laughing and we realized that they ALSO have Dish, and for some strange reason, our frequencies were set to the same channel - so we were changing channels on each other! What’s even funnier is that his wife was watching Guiding Light from that day, and so was my husband - both of us had DVRed it.

So we stood there and talked for awhile - turns out he works as a manager for Radio Shack, so he fixed the problem on his own and we haven’t had any problems since. The nice thing was that we were finally able to meet our neighbors and we’ve got plans to get together (and they plan to have kids around the same time as us, so it’ll be wonderful for our first kid to have a playmate). We still laugh when we think that we spent the whole night cussing at the Dish when it wasn’t really their fault - it was just an odd chance that they were both programmed to the same frequency.

E.

50

I’m not stupid, heh.

I got a digital cable box about four months before I quit the cable company altogether. It upped my cable bill to $90 a month, and it was definitely digital cable as the box was for digital cable, I had the channel lineup of my cable company’s basic digital plan. And when I would turn my box/TV on I had many features that obviously identified it as digital (interactive programming guide, one click ordering of PPV, stuff liek that.)

And yet TBS was still fuzzy. All 4 of the networks were obviously still being sent to me in broadcast quality, I have no idea the technology or the why behind it. But from what I understood if it’s digital and it goes out it’s just “out” there’s no “in between.” You can only get snow and channel bleed throughs from an old-style signal, and I still got those on some channels when I definitely had a digital box hooked up to my TV and working.

51

Link

This link (to a DirecTV website) mentions specifically that many digital cable packages are a mixed digital/analog service.

While obviously this is an advertisement for DirecTV I don’t think they’d just completely lie about something that can easily be proven incorrect. So obviously it isn’t impossible to get both analog and digital on the same box.

Also I should mention I don’t have any “position” on the cable/satellite issue. I have friends that live in other counties with different cable companies and many of them have really fast internet service combined with pretty much perfect picture quality.

I just wasn’t getting that and I got tired of paying $90/month when I could pay like $42 for satellite.

52

I have digital cable and the physical cable absolutely can carry both a digital and analog signal at the same time, it would be very simple to have a box decode both D and A within a single unit. For some stations, it may be easier to maintain them on the analog side and just provide additional or special channels on digital. Or, the signal could have been snowy at the source and the snow got digitized with everything else.

53

Nope, nope, nope. If you subscribe to the digital tier from your cable provider you almost certainly are receiveing both an analog signal and a digital signal. (There now only a very few CATV systems which are all digital.) Typically, the cutoff point in the transmitted spectrum is at 550MHz. (5 - 42MHz is reserved for return path signal; 54 - 550MHz is the analog forward spectrum; 550MHz and up to 1GHz is the digital forward. Each channel consumes 6 MHZ of the broadcast spectrum.) Signals on the carrier frequency below 550MHz are analog and signals above that point are digital. While you are correct you can’t have both a digital and analog input to your television on the same connector, the cable coming into your house isn’t connected directly to the television set. It is connected to a convertor box. That box converts the digital signal to an analog one, which is the only format your television (unless you have an HD ready one) recognizes. The box, of course, perfroms several other functions, such as de-scrambling and presenting the signal to your television on the piece of the spectrum it recognizes as “Channel 3.”

Here’s a .pdf of the broadcast spectrum as allocated by the FCC. Cable operators, although they’re not required to, almost universally follow this simply because it’s easier to do so for the frequencies they pull “off-air.”

54

And this .pdf has a chart showing a pretty typical CATV spectrum allocation scheme. See figure 4:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/97518859/PDFSTART

55

I was going to advise you to check with your neighbors, since I’ve heard of this happening before.

For those of you who are discussing weather outages, keep in mind that it’s not the weather that’s over you that’s the problem. It’s the weather that’s in your satellite’s line of sight. Depending on your azimuth and elevation settings, that could be waaaaaaay far away.

Still better’n cable though.

56

I switched to Dish to get a DVR. I called Comcast first and asked what the cheapest plan would be with which I could get one. I was told it’d be the cheapest Digital Cable plan, which was $75 per month (before the slew of taxes get tacked on). I told the rep she had to be kidding as SBC’s price was half that. She warned me that they make you sign a contract. I later found out I didn’t, and signed up.

When I called Comcast to cancel, the drone on the line said “Well what if we offer Digital Gold with 18 HBOs and 50 Showtimes for one year for $39.99 per month?” I told her that would have been great had I been offered it when I called the first time, just cancel my account please.

Do these people ever think of just offering a reasonable price to everyone, not just people who are quitting?

57

I just spoke with my sister bemoaning the fact that I’ll be having the dish on a pole in my sideyard (I don’t have a backyard, just a hugeassed side yard) and she stated she is going to switch over to dish within the next few weeks also.

They just moved and they (of course) moved their ever so lovely Comcast with them. The installer left the cable lying across their yard. The hook up into the house fell off. Another person came along and buried the cable less than a few inches down. The dog promptly dug it back up. The hook up to the house? That guy secured it with duct tape. Sis is quite frustrated. When she called them this morning she was told the earliest they can come back out is next Tuesday. Until then they have very poor reception, if any at all.

She stated she is done with them. They have jacked prices up numerous times. She spoke with someone else who lives in the same city bit different ZIP code who pays $20/mo less for the same package. Sis was never given an answer why the difference, they just offered a higher package for the same price.

58

A note for Dish DVR customers: The channel lag is annoying. That’s why there’s a ‘skip up five channels’ button on the remote that can be used while messing with the Guide. That’s what I do, use the Guide and Info button, not go from channel to channel.

Been using Dish for years. Love it.

59

Heh, they’re walking a fine line there. It’s like a car dealer that drops his price as you start walking away from him. Most people accept the initial terms and won’t try to lower the price, while others will. They need a little wiggle room to give in to those that threaten to leave if they don’t offer them a better deal, while still trying to keep the original offers competitive enough to attract costomers.

60

OK, I was wrong about the digital/analog thing, my mistake. And it sucks that your major stations were braodcast quality.

But I still stick with cable cause…well, I ahve to. As said, I live in an apartment, and I doubt the landlord would enjoy me sticking things on the outside of it. :stuck_out_tongue:

I just got my plan, it gets hooked up Friday, and it’s the combo all digital+internet plan (they say all digital, at least.) I think all four major networks are HD. What I was shocked at, though, was the price or premium channels. $10/month extra just for HBO? Ack! Granted, it was for about five HBO’s, including on demand, but I would rather get one of every premium channel than five of one.

Plus, I figure even if I did have a dish at, let’s say $40/month, I would then still need to get high speed internet, and I would have to get DSL since I am assuming I want no cable at all, and that’s usually in the $30-$50/month range, So overall I’m not paying that much more per month. Plus, I HATE channel lag. It’s bad enough on digital cable, at about a second (I don’t know personally, but I have used it at other places and this seems about right), but possibly waiting ten seconds? Hell no. I am a big channel surferr, and that would not suit me at all. What I love about digital cable, though (but I’m 100% this is on dish, too) is the on screen guide, becuase I can continue to watch on show while seeing what else is on. The TVGuide channel is crap, and it takes too lnog to scroll through everything, especially when I am only interested in what’s on of a few channels.

Anyways, I’ll see what it’s like on Friday. Actually, I won’t…not till Saturday. I got oen digital hookup and one normal hookup, since the second TV would be in the bedroom where all I watch is adult swim before bed. And my normal hookup is with an HD box, since my main TV is HD, so that won’t work on the non-HD tv, and the HD TV won’t be moved until Saturday.

Hmm…I hope they can hook it all up without actually having the TV to test it on.