What to do for cable/dish and internet?

[Trouble Maker]

So we can't figure out what we are going to do for this stuff. One of the main problems is that our Apartment complex only has Aldephia right now and they SUCK. Horrilbe content and only analog right now. I guess Time Warner just bought them out. We have no clue when it's actually going to be done by Time Warner in our complex though. Apartment says in December, I'm not holding my breath or waiting that long/having shitty service for that long. I really don't like Warner very much anyways.

 

Whatever we do, I want a DVR.

 

Anyone have Dish Network or Direct TV and what do you or don't you like about them?

 

Do you HAVE to have both of them plugged into a land line?

 

What do people who use a dish do for the internet (broadband/dsl, I don't give two shits about dial up)?

 

I have two friends that I visit often up in Toledo that have Dish Network and they really seem to like it. I've liked it whenever I'm up there using it.

[ohio_wookie]

i think that dish and direct tv sucked, i currently have adelphia and i have no problems with it at all, good tv, and fast internet. I average about 1MB/s on just about everything. But what ever you do dont get the satallite internet, for the cost it is way to slow, and direct tvs internet has a 100MB fair share limit, and if you download more than 100MB in a matter of like an hour or so they restrict your bandwidth to dial up speeds for the proceeding 24 hours. it was really bad.

[Trouble Maker]

i think that dish and direct tv sucked, i currently have adelphia and i have no problems with it at all, good tv, and fast internet...

 

What did you think of the TV portion of Direct TV and Dish?

Was it just the Internet thing that pissed you off?

 

I briefly looked at the stuff for Satellite TV Internet but I was under the impression that it wasn't up to par yet. I was looking more along the lines of people who have standalone DSL or Cable Internet (as we would have to do if we got a dish). Really it wouldn’t matter if they had it bundled with regular cable but that’s all I’m really interested in.

 

Did you have to have either of them hooked into a phone line?

 

We had Aldephia up in Ada at the house and it sucked. We couldn’t get any kind of service done and we were paying a lot because we had digital boxes with every channel on ~20tv's. The format, content, and reliability were horrible. But it was the only thing available. It may be different in Columbus but I've been really turned off by that company. Not to mention the fact that it's only analog in our complex right now. So we can't get a DVR through them. Time Warner will be taking it over, but who knows when they will switch out everything in our apartment complex??? I don't want to have to wait 2-6 months to get a decent selection of channels, digital sound, good picture and a DVR.

[Orion]

if you guys rock laptops, you should get evdo cards from verizon. hell, you even get a nice discount since you already have phone service with them.

[Brandon]

direct t.v is by far the best for picture quality for you televison experience. Any type of cable blows my balls.

[Trouble Maker]

if you guys rock laptops, you should get evdo cards from verizon. hell, you even get a nice discount since you already have phone service with them.

 

Umm, that'll just cover our internet and it would be 60/person. I'm thinking we can get cable/dish and internet for less than that. I don't have a laptop so I'd also have to buy a PCMCIA adapter which we found out the other day are nigh impossible to find at a B&M store and just another cost. I'll take Cable internet or DSL at ~25/person (at most), until the price of that type of stuff comes down (at which point, Cable internet and DSL will probably be cheaper).

 

Brandon, why do you like Direct TV better than Dish??

 

I know one thing I already don't like about Direct TV is the way the program look up works on their DVR's. It goes by time slot only and Dish Network goes by name.

 

ANYONE, do you have to hook either of them up to a phone line? That could be what makes us decide one over the other becuase we don't currently have a land line or necessairly plan on getting one.

[Orion]

yeah, duh. what was i thinkin. my bad. of course its much less expensive for you guys to share.

 

good luck man. call wide open west. i had those guys a while back, and they freakin rock. i think n2o bird works fo dems.

 

as far as phones go, if you must have a landline, get vonage and run it through your ip. voip=pimp shizzle. or, just come see me and let me step up your minutes to offset not having a home phone. if you do come see me, bring your sister again.

[Total Sign]

Used to have Dish Network. Now have Time Warner and Road Runner with all of the same channels, for less money. Had dish in 00-01, and it sucked. No local channels, hard rain would mean no tv, and if some punk ran into it late at night you are SOL.

 

Friend has Direc Way for his satellite high speed internet, and keeps bragging about how it will be so much faster than road runner, but he has yet to get it to work right (56k kicks his ass).

 

Neither satellite companies have to be connected to a phone line. But you are able to connect them (same with Time Warner) to a phone line for movie ordering.

 

Orion, with Vonage, how does it compare on collect calls? Do you still have a "normal" phone number?

[Orion]

yes you do. in fact, its unlisted. check their website, its got all the info you need.

[ohio_wookie]

yeah direct tv had ok channel choice, i miss techtv. and none of them connect to phone lines. but as far as i know with adelphia you have to have basic cable to get their internet. and the thing about direcway is it has the ability to be extremly fast, but you have to sign up for a business package, which is hella expensive.

[Trouble Maker]

good luck man. call wide open west. i had those guys a while back, and they freakin rock. i think n2o bird works fo dems.

 

as far as phones go, if you must have a landline, get vonage and run it through your ip. voip=pimp shizzle. or, just come see me and let me step up your minutes to offset not having a home phone. if you do come see me, bring your sister again.

 

Well, to have VOIP we must have cable internet. Cable internet+VOIP would cost more than Land Line+DSL. But since we wouldn't have to have a phone line to get either Dish it doesn't really matter. We would have absolutely no reason other than the Dish or DSL to get a land line (or VOIP based 'land line').

 

I never talked on the land line at my parents house anyways so I'm not worried about my minutes. I do almost all of my talking in the evenings, on the weekends, or to someone in the Verizon network. Most months I use 1000+minutes, but only ~200 during peak hours. I've probably never used over 250, so 400 peak is plenty. You know I'll be coming to you when I decide to get another phone so don't worry.

 

Unfortunately since we live in an apartment complex we are currently ONLY set up for Aldephia. We will be getting Time Warner sometime in the future and getting rid of Aldephia, but who knows when that will be? I'd probably get WOW in a heartbeat if we could. My parents had Time Warner and I never liked it. They are overpriced for this market. They did a shitty job on the wiring which caused many months of confusion with why our Road Runner would occasionally cut out. They had to come out half a dozen times before we happened to get someone who knew their ass from a hole in the ground that found the wiring issue. At least they compensated our bill for downtime no questions asked, but I'm pretty sure any 'telecommunications' business has to do that per FCC 'laws' anyways. I loved WOW once they switched over.

 

and none of them connect to phone lines. but as far as i know with adelphia you have to have basic cable to get their internet.

 

Thank you Jesus someone answered the one question I really needed answered.[/southernaccent] I’ll have to check on that Aldephia thing, that would suck. Maybe that’s why so many people around us seem to have DSL (because they don't want cable, but want high speed internet). Thanks for the heads up.

 

We just need to find out how to steal all of this and be done with it.

[Nitrousbird]

direct t.v is by far the best for picture quality for you televison experience. Any type of cable blows my balls.

Funny how my cable looks better than my girlfriend's brand new Direct TV setup. It's all about the digital compression there bud. Each Sat. company only gets a limited amount of bandwidth, and the more channels they add, the more limited that bandwidth gets. Something has to give somewhere.

 

Since you aren't happy with your cable options there, sat. is your only other option. The new dual-tuner Tivo units Direct TV is using are pretty nice. My biggest complaints about Sat. are getting your service knocked out every time there is a storm, or digital breakup every time something flys in its direct path.

[Trouble Maker]

Funny how my cable looks better than my girlfriend's brand new Direct TV setup. It's all about the digital compression there bud. Each Sat. company only gets a limited amount of bandwidth, and the more channels they add, the more limited that bandwidth gets. Something has to give somewhere.

 

Since you aren't happy with your cable options there, sat. is your only other option. The new dual-tuner Tivo units Direct TV is using are pretty nice. My biggest complaints about Sat. are getting your service knocked out every time there is a storm, or digital breakup every time something flys in its direct path.

 

Same can be said about Cable, there is only so much you can push through that wire with a given modulation technology, compression scheme and the characteristics of the transmission line (cable). The modulation and compression technology will increase in both realms allowing more information to get through. Only difference is satellite can't do anything to improve their 'cable'. They are given a certain bandwidth and that's it (I'm assuming even though it's directional it's just like any other frequency allotment and the FCC gives them a certain portion). For the cable companies to improve their transmission lines they have to go rewire a bunch of stuff. Costly but not impossible. On the flipside, I'm sure if the satellite companies were having a serious bandwidth problem. They would open up a different spectrum and give everyone more.

 

Back on topic. I've heard that satellites have recently improved a lot at not dropping out, and I've never seen my friends in Toledo drop out. I think maybe they have just gotten a bad rap from the past. How bad is it on your g/f's dish from your experience?

 

 

As far as I understand this is how they work.

 

I really don't like the search scheme on TiVo/Direct TV uses compared to whatever box Dish uses.... It's only time based and what Dish uses is name based.

 

For instance if you want to record Family Guy on TiVo you have to go enter in whatever channel Cartoon Network is on and the time it's on... and TBS and the time... then if Cartoon Network decides to change their lineup like they do ever month or two you have to change the time.

 

With Dish you say "Record all or new Family Guys" and it does all of that on it's own.

 

Both Dish Network and Direct seem to have pretty comparable boxes. Do you know if your g/f's box will send out the second signal through the house via the existing wiring? The Dish Network one will. I thought that was pretty cool.

[desperado]

Ok, as far as the dish thing and Internet. Anything that Dish network or Direct TV is doing is oneway, the download at high speed but you upload and make IP requests across a phone line. The dish does NOT transmit. So you are capped for speed because of the way TCPIP works being an acknowledged protocol, the ack's go across the phone line as the packets come in off the dish. You are limited to about 384 because the ack's can't be uploaded any faster and that is with a full 56k phone connection, if the connect speed on the line is slow then the download sweed goes down too. If they are doing something different now, I don't know about it, but that was the case when I looked into it a couple months ago. And sharing the bandwidth is a bitch because of this also. It ain't like just running it into a router/NAT appliance and plugging everything else into the inside of the router.

And what dude said about the 100 MB fair share limit. That's not 100 mb of downloading files. That is 100 mb of total incoming traffic, so ALL packets are counted, not just FTP or HTTP file transfer. Sit and consider what one jpeg file is on a web site, there are 4 to 6 jpegs per meg, and 100 meg. How long would it take how many of you living there to burn up 100mb??

 

Now, as far as the two way dishes (not direct TV or Dish that are only one way) there are a few services that offer high speed across a two way link. These HAVE to be installed by an FCC licensed installer (lots of money) and they have both a daily fair share and a monthly fair share agreement.

[desperado]

Oh, and Time Warner took 2 years to update the system out here after buying it from Adelphia. And the idea they communicated anything to the landlord is questionable at best. But if they have cable modem there now, they should have digital cable, becasue both require two way amplifiers on the system to make those services work. If they don't have digital, and they have put in cable modem, I wouldn't expect them to roll out any other services like digital cable for quite awhile. I ai't gonna bore you with all the details of what they go through to deside who gets what. But Time Warner is buying up all the little guys where there is alot of houses going up and updating those systems. If your system is updated, they ain't gonna screw with it again for quite a while.

[fush]

I have a Directv/Tivo and its definatly not only time based. Directv recently started marketing their own branded DVR and that may be what you saw. The Tivo can search by Time, Title, Actor, Genere etc. If you get the Directv just pick up the Tivo elsewhere instead of their DVR. You do need the phone hookup for the Tivo for software and updates. I took the liberty of modifying mine and it uses ethernet now instead of the phone line. Overall I'm happy with the setup. I can't comment on the picture quality versus cable as its been a while but I don't think my TV's good enough to honestly even care. I have SBC 3Mbps DSL and its been rock solid ever since they fixed my connection at the RT.

[Nitrousbird]

Same can be said about Cable, there is only so much you can push through that wire with a given modulation technology, compression scheme and the characteristics of the transmission line (cable). The modulation and compression technology will increase in both realms allowing more information to get through. Only difference is satellite can't do anything to improve their 'cable'. They are given a certain bandwidth and that's it (I'm assuming even though it's directional it's just like any other frequency allotment and the FCC gives them a certain portion). For the cable companies to improve their transmission lines they have to go rewire a bunch of stuff. Costly but not impossible. On the flipside, I'm sure if the satellite companies were having a serious bandwidth problem. They would open up a different spectrum and give everyone more.

 

Back on topic. I've heard that satellites have recently improved a lot at not dropping out, and I've never seen my friends in Toledo drop out. I think maybe they have just gotten a bad rap from the past. How bad is it on your g/f's dish from your experience?

 

 

As far as I understand this is how they work.

 

I really don't like the search scheme on TiVo/Direct TV uses compared to whatever box Dish uses.... It's only time based and what Dish uses is name based.

 

For instance if you want to record Family Guy on TiVo you have to go enter in whatever channel Cartoon Network is on and the time it's on... and TBS and the time... then if Cartoon Network decides to change their lineup like they do ever month or two you have to change the time.

 

With Dish you say "Record all or new Family Guys" and it does all of that on it's own.

 

Both Dish Network and Direct seem to have pretty comparable boxes. Do you know if your g/f's box will send out the second signal through the house via the existing wiring? The Dish Network one will. I thought that was pretty cool.

The difference is cable has 1GHz of bandwidth to work with, reliably, with what is currently out there.

 

My g/f hasn't had hers long enough to really tell when it will drop signal. She lives in the middle of nowhere, so things flying over shouldn't be a problem, just weather, but she hasn't watched it enough to have any complaints yet. And her dish does allow for multiple receivors.

[Trouble Maker]

The difference is cable has 1GHz of bandwidth to work with, reliably, with what is currently out there.

 

My g/f hasn't had hers long enough to really tell when it will drop signal. She lives in the middle of nowhere, so things flying over shouldn't be a problem, just weather, but she hasn't watched it enough to have any complaints yet. And her dish does allow for multiple receivors.

 

Oh, I wasn't saying the dish. AFAIK most all of the modern dishes don't have a problem with multiple recievers.

 

Some (if not all?) of the DVR's for satalite that have two tunners can output the second tunner (or something off of the Hard Drive) out onto your existing cable system. So I'd have an RF remote for the second tunner in my bedroom and be able to connect my TV straight to the existing wiring and watch/record stuff on the DVR box sitting in the living room. I know the Dish box is like that but wasn't sure about the Direct TV box.

[lemosley01]

We have Dish for TV and I use Roadrunner for my internet.

 

My DISH setup runs us about $65 a month. This is a setup for 3 TVs, with DVRs on two TVs and America's Top 180. That is less than we were paying through Roadrunner for digital cable and as many channels, although quite a few are BS channels (as are Roadrunner's). The DVRD is actually a dual tuner/dual DVR (I think it is the 522). 1 tuner goes to my downstairs TV, the other to the upstairs TV. We have a separate (Dish 301) receiver on the TV in our bedroom. Only the tuner downstairs is plugged into the phone line.

 

The picture quality is about the same. I think TW's digital cable looked better, but their analog channels looked like shit - we watched a lot of the lower channels which were analog, so changing to Dish was an upgrade for the majority of what we watch.

 

I have a HDTV, but I didn't get Dish's HD package, so I can't comment on it. I am looking at getting an off-the-air HD tuner later, since most of what I want to see on HD is over the networks anyhow.

 

As far as the DVRs - we love them. Easy to use, although the 522 seems to have a couple of bugs that have forced me to reset it about 3 times in the last 6 months. However, in all fairness, I had an equal number of problems with the set top box we had with TW.

 

Reliability has been excellent, not quite as good as cable, but we have lost signal twice that I know of during VERY hard storms - the kind where you should probably shut down your TV anyhow. Both outages were very short. The real test will come this winter when it is snowing.

 

I wanted to try something different, and decided on satellite. I am very pleased with Dish thus far after 6 months.

[Trouble Maker]

Thanks for all of the replies!

 

I found out with Dish yesterday that you don't have to have a phone line but you lose the interactive stuff (weather via some menues, crap like that), and they charge you $5/month. Just a bullshit charge but it's cheaper than a useless landline. I ordered dish yesterday and they will be out Sunday! We are going to get the 120 package because it has everything we want and only one box that can send out to a second TV. Afaik it can output across the whole wiring network and watch it on several TV’s, just you can only tune to one channel on any of those TV’s.

 

Still don't know what we are going to do about internet. Ben called Aldephia and for some reason it looks like half of the apartment complex can get Digital Cable and Internet and half of it can only get Digital Cable?!? We just happen to be in the half that is only cable and no internet. They have no idea why and are coming out to check on it today. Hopefully we can get that because it will be cheaper and faster than DSL.

 

Again, thanks for all of the replies!

[lemosley01]

Thanks for all of the replies!

 

I found out with Dish yesterday that you don't have to have a phone line but you lose the interactive stuff (weather via some menues, crap like that), and they charge you $5/month. Just a bullshit charge but it's cheaper than a useless landline. I ordered dish yesterday and they will be out Sunday! We are going to get the 120 package because it has everything we want and only one box that can send out to a second TV. Afaik it can output across the whole wiring network and watch it on several TV’s, just you can only tune to one channel on any of those TV’s.

 

Still don't know what we are going to do about internet. Ben called Aldephia and for some reason it looks like half of the apartment complex can get Digital Cable and Internet and half of it can only get Digital Cable?!? We just happen to be in the half that is only cable and no internet. They have no idea why and are coming out to check on it today. Hopefully we can get that because it will be cheaper and faster than DSL.

 

Again, thanks for all of the replies!

 

This is correct - to watch different channels on different tvs, you will need one tuner per TV. Analog cable allows each tv to tune in without anything special, but digital cable also requires a set top box for each television.

 

Did you get the DVR? If you didn't, I HIGHLY recommend it. It costs 5 bux more per month but it is so worth it. I was skeptical at first, but I am glad I did it. I don't like watching 'live' TV anymore because I can't skip through the commercials. I prefer to DVR the stuff, go do something else, and watch it later so I don't have to waste time in commercials.

[Trouble Maker]

Oh, I defintely got the DVR. That was the key thing through all of this!

 

It's the 625 box, the one they are giving out free now.