Direct TV vs Dish Network

[TnAndy]

I have a personal goal of being the last person on the planet that doesn't have a smart phone.

Then you have some serious competition from my house....

Got a 15 buck/mo flip phone the wife keeps in her car for emergency use.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

I do all my own dish install, moves, etc. I own all my dish equip, no rental fee.

 

[Dftodd]

Didn't have much of an issue with dish network as long as things went smoothly. Customer service stinks. But then again satellite and cell phone companies tend to have pretty crappy customer service anyway. biggest beef with them was dropping and losing channels periodically do to contract negotiations. Finally just got fed up with satellite in general. Ditched the dish, put up an amplified antennae on the roof where the dish was to get local stations to keep up with the news. And use a roku stick with Netflix. Much happier and only costs $10 per month :cool2:

 

[Dftodd]

Agree...we are stuck with Hughesnet for internet with a 15gb data cap (for the low low price of too much).

Neighbor signed up with them also. I had suggested DSL through the local phone provider when they moved in and asked about utilities. It was unlimited usage for a set price. At the time though it was a 3mbps speed and was to slow for what they "needed". A few month later they hooked up the fiber optics they ran a few years before. Neighbor was griping about hughesnet a couple months later, when I had the phone company out updating the lines to my house and getting my speed bumped up to 50mbps. They had a special lifetime promo for existing customers. So my speed got bumped to the max, for the price of the 3mbps. He made the switch to dsl, but ended up having to pay the full price which worked out to about the same as hughesnet. But at least it's unlimited without the throttling.

 

[Kyle_in_Tex]

We were Direct tv subscribers for over 15 years. Every year, the price creeps up and up, trying to secure any meaningful discount for customer loyalty was fruitless. Threats to move to Dish tv were not a concern to Direct.
Finally,with the wife constantly lobbying for a severe budget cut for tv, I cancelled DTV and locked into Dish. An immediate $68 cut in monthly cost, locked in for two years. I had some issues reprogramming my brain to learn the Dish remote, but I get more movie channels, and the local college team now, that DTV didn't offer.
One other thing, after about 2 months, I caught the cable that goes to the house with the lawnmower and destroyed it. Dish came out that same day and replaced it at no charge, even though it was clearly my fault. I intend to reward that kind of service with my continued subscription until There is a better option.

The first part explains us. 17 year customers of DirecTV. I don't like their "extra prices" for HD, or extra TV's using hopper or joey devices. We quit, haven't signed up to Dish yet....using Netflix, Roku, Hulu and Amazon Prime.

I'm about to buy an outdoor antenna, but I need it to pick up 60 miles. the cheap one I have my eye on seems to have problems with the amplifier dying after a few months...It's always something.

 

[dmccarty]

My DSL is 6Mbps. Best they can do over the old phone lines. Not exactly what I would call High speed.

Fast enough. I streamed at 4MBPS for a while before they sped things up.
...

We have a whopping 1.5 mbps and we are able to stream without much problem. We added a second 1.5 mbps line to the house so that we have one line and the kids have the other. Prior to the second line we might have some buffering from time to time if the kids and we were streaming. If we have any buffering now, it is time to reset the router and modem.

The numbers I have seen suggest that pay TV has peaked and subscribers are dropping the service to never return. I can't ever see us returning to Pay TV, there simply is nothing on to watch not to mention the ever increasing cost. I can get on YouTube, get completely lost watching various programs and hours go by without me noticing. :shocked: I was up until 2:30am Saturday night/Sunday morning watching videos of The Avett Brothers. :shocked: Gotta stop doing that.... :laughing::laughing::laughing:

Later,
Dan

 

[Larry Caldwell]

I've been with Dish for about 20 years. They have treated me fairly, and always repaired the system free of charge, even when a yard guy broke the satellite dish. Right now I just upgraded to the new Hopper 3, which records 16 shows at a time, stores 2000 hours of HDTV, and loads recorded shows onto my Samsung Android tablet for TV viewing when I'm on the road. It would do that remotely, but my home internet is too slow to upload shows onto the web. As long as I do it at home, it works fine, but it won't use the memory upgrade in my tablet for security reasons. You can watch shows on a cell phone, but that's a pretty small screen. I think they probably have an app for Apple products too.

 

[PILOON]

Every 2 weeks I receive 'package offers' in the mail but (just to bug them) I call to take the offer*.
The answer is always the same once I give them my ZIP code.
No service in your area!

Shame is that when TV was analogue I got all the channels I wanted but digital changed all that.
So we have limited (private) internet, land line phone as cell is spotty and satellite TV.
Result is that we don't benefit from any package (bundle*) deals.
Forget VOIP
Very costly.

And yet the providers receive all sorts of gov't subsidies'

*Phone, TV and internet package.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

My DSL is 6Mbps. Best they can do over the old phone lines. Not exactly what I would call High speed.

My DSL is 1 mbps, and I'm lucky to get that. It was installed by an enthusiastic tech. When I checked with the phone company about slow service they said I was too far from the switch to get digital service.

 

[kcflhrc]

Every 2 weeks I receive 'package offers' in the mail but (just to bug them) I call to take the offer*.
The answer is always the same once I give them my ZIP code.
No service in your area!

Shame is that when TV was analogue I got all the channels I wanted but digital changed all that.
So we have limited (private) internet, land line phone as cell is spotty and satellite TV.
Result is that we don't benefit from any package (bundle*) deals.
Forget VOIP
Very costly.

And yet the providers receive all sorts of gov't subsidies'

*Phone, TV and internet package.

Do you even know what VOIP is and how it works? You say it's costly but it is dependent on your internet connection. VOIP itself is not costly but the internet speed that supports it can be.