Satelitte tv?

[Kennywife]

I am thinking of switching to satelitte tv since our cable bill keeps going up. PLus, we get more outages lately. Directv looks to be the closest to what we have. Plus, I need internet as well.

Anybody have satelitte and do you like it or not?

Anna

 

[blondietink]

We have had satellite TV since the old Prime Star days. Now it is called Directv. The only issue with any satellite service is that when there is a thunderstorm overhead, you will lose reception, but it usually only lasts 5 minutes or less. Sometimes also we lose it if there is wet, heavy, slushy snow. We just wipe off the satellite dish and we are fine. Our dish is on the ground. Without satellite we would have no television reception. There is no cable service here and antenna has no reception, either. We are very happy with Directv. We cannot get Dish Network here because there are too many trees and their satellites are behind our trees, which we will not cut down just to get their satellite reception.

We also have Hughesnet satellite for internet. It is not cheap, and it is not as fast as cable, but it is really good compared to dial-up. Without the satellite internet, we would have a choice of dial-up only. No cable, again, available here and also no FIOS service.

 

[vicki_c]

I wouldn't recommend satellite for your Internet service unless you don't have another choice. We have DirecTV for the TV, but we get our Internet through Verizon FIOS along with the phone.

Our experience is the same as the PP - goes out for a few minutes right before bad storms arrive, and sometimes gets heavy wet snow on it, but that is rare. We've had DirecTV since 2001 and have always been entirely happy with it. They have wonderful customer service too.

 

[cormmac3]

I will never do cable,again. The prices are outrageous! We had Dircet tv, I loved them, but our bill kept going up. So I play the game, we now switched to Direct tv. We get a low price for a year, plus a couple of extras.It saves money!

 

[Kycha]

We have Dish Network and it goes out all the time. We used to have cable. And in the 20+ years we had it, we lost service 3 times. The satellite we have now goes out once a week. Usually due to storms. Unfortunately, satellite is our only option for tv since we moved. But our county is putting in fiber optics. So, hopefully by Sept(when our contract ends) we will be switching. Oh, and when we had cable, we never had to sign a contract. We would pay a hook up fee(sometimes waived if there was a special) and we could cancel anytime without penalty. Not so with Dish Network(and I'm pretty sure DirecTv makes you sign a contract too).

 

[Muushka]

I can guarentee you if you switch to DircTv, your monthly charges will go up....up....up.....

 

[si-am]

We have Direct TV. That is my husband's bill to pay, so I don't know how much it runs us, but I do know he has talked them into free upgrades (HD receiver, then dvr) by threatening to walk.

It does go out in thunderstorms. Sometimes it goes out when a storm is approaching, when it's not even raining yet. We lost it once due to snow and since it's on the roof, that was annoying because we couldn't get to it.

Other than that, we've been pretty happy with it.

 

[DawnM]

My directv bill used to be $42/month 12 years ago.
It is now a bit over $100 for the same services other than adding HD. We have always had the same/similar programming.

We are cutting it completely and going to over the air TV and Roku boxes with Netflix and HuluPlus.

$100/mo cut to $17/month.... almost a full $1,000 savings per year.

Dawn

 

[drinkme]

We have Dish Network and it goes out all the time. We used to have cable. And in the 20+ years we had it, we lost service 3 times. The satellite we have now goes out once a week. Usually due to storms. Unfortunately, satellite is our only option for tv since we moved. But our county is putting in fiber optics. So, hopefully by Sept(when our contract ends) we will be switching. Oh, and when we had cable, we never had to sign a contract. We would pay a hook up fee(sometimes waived if there was a special) and we could cancel anytime without penalty. Not so with Dish Network(and I'm pretty sure DirecTv makes you sign a contract too).

We have the opposite experience. We had cable and it went out all of the time. We've had Dish Network for 6 years now and it has only gone out a few times. However, the price has really creeped up! We now pay around $80 a month for HD and no movie channels.

 

[Muushka]

We have the opposite experience. We had cable and it went out all of the time. We've had Dish Network for 6 years now and it has only gone out a few times. However, the price has really creeped up! We now pay around $80 a month for HD and no movie channels.

Way back, like 15 years ago we had cable. It went out all the time! So we switched to Dish (then to DirecTv) and it also went out, but at least we knew when it would go out (during storms).

So we got fed up with DirecTv and their prices going up an just cut it all off and had Netflix and an antenna. Loved those bills!

But then a few months ago our local cable company offered a deal (no contract, and set price for 2 years) so we went back to cable.

We have not lost our cable for 1 minute for the past 3 months.

 

[sam_gordon]

We have Dish Network and it goes out all the time. We used to have cable. And in the 20+ years we had it, we lost service 3 times. The satellite we have now goes out once a week. Usually due to storms. Unfortunately, satellite is our only option for tv since we moved. But our county is putting in fiber optics. So, hopefully by Sept(when our contract ends) we will be switching. Oh, and when we had cable, we never had to sign a contract. We would pay a hook up fee(sometimes waived if there was a special) and we could cancel anytime without penalty. Not so with Dish Network(and I'm pretty sure DirecTv makes you sign a contract too).

If your satellite goes out once a week, I suggest contacting Dish and getting a "repoint" done.

 

[timmac]

Just to echo what a few others have said, using satellite for your internet service should only be an absolute last resort. Though the downstream speed is (theoretically) not bad, the upstream speed is slow. Not bad for basic web browsing and e-mail, but if you go to upload a bunch of pictures to facebook for instance, you'll feel the pain.

 

[Madison'smommy]

We have Dish... we rarely have a problem with it going out!

 

[jgates]

We have DirecTV - only problems are of our own making such as the trees have grown up so large in our yard that we now have no service until we get a few branches cut - that's our issue, not theirs.

We run around $72 a month but we have E/W coast feed of CBS/ABC/FOX (we didn't receive on antenna because of a hill behind house). We could receive those via local but we haven't had a new dish installed to get 'local' channels (why pay to fix something that isn't broken). We have added 1 or 2 ala carte channels (something with military or guns) but have no movie channels. That keeps our costs down. I think we actually could drop a couple bucks if we did the new dish install, but it is fine for us right now.

We have maybe 2 to 4 'drop's a year - huge thunderstorms (common in WI) or super wet snow. Our dish is low enough to use a broom to swish it off for the snow. We have had it since the first installation period in ?? 1993 or whatever it was.

Had satellite internet through a regional company - hated it. Faster than dial-up but not good. Pushed with phone company until they finally agreed we could have DSL. (Only runs about 35% of normal DSL speed because of our distance from center box but still decent). Wouldn't go back to satellite for that unless it was the only thing we could do.

 

[Robmom]

I had Cablevision, and wasn't happy and saw that Dish Network was much cheaper. I liked it, but it would lose service a lot. Then the price got to be more than what cable was costing. Finally the last straw was there was when we had a huge wind storm that knocked out my service. Apparently Dish contracts out service calls to other vendors. When I called for service, they told me the next appointment they had available was in 2 months! I told them that it was not acceptable.

I cancelled Dish and now have Verizon FiOs, and haven't had one problem since.