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Review by Smith6612 
UPDATED: 114 days ago
member for 307 days, 433 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 North Tonawanda,Niagara,NY
 Contract price not specified.
 "Lots of HD channels that look nice, good selection of channels. Can take it with you on vacation!"
 "Nothing besides the dropouts from severe T-Storms, which is rare anyways with a properly pointed dish."
 "Great company to get satellite TV from."
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Install Co-ordination:
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Tech Support:
Value for money:
(ratings above consensus)
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So far we've had DISH Network for around 6-7 years now since Adelphia messed up a while ago, making us leave. We have one of their higher packages (can't recall off hand what it is) that includes a lot of sports channels, good selection of Cartoon channels for the family and of course the news channels. Not to mention Boomerang which is where a lot of my favorite cartoons are still showed.
Installation went without a problem. When the DISH network truck arrived, they took a quick examination at the house layout and the cable system. Once they found out what would be the best way to install the service, one of the installers worked on mounting and pointing the two satellite dishes, one's a DISH 500 dish on the side of our house attached to the siding that points at 110 and 119 West, and another satellite dish on our roof that points to 61.5 West. While mounting the satellites and rotating them, the installer taking care of that job also had some sort of device that measured the signal coming in and fine tuned it. The coax wires from the satellite dishes were neatly hidden from sight, and were secured in place to make sure the wind didn't bump the cables out, and then the cables were ran into the basement. Down in the basement, another installer was installing a satellite switch, that allowed us to use 3 satellites at once and allows us to split the signals into 4 different receivers. Afterwards, the same installer located our telephone wiring in the basement, and ran a new cable to our receiver's location to hook up the receiver to phone home. After the basic equipment was done and we had gotten the house's cable system rewired, the installers pulled our Adelphia line for us and got to work activating our receivers for the first time. Two of the receivers were DP311s, and one of them was a DISH Pro Plus PVR unit with a 60 hour recording space.
Once they left, the service was all set and done. The picture quality was certainly a lot better than the cable was, even when we had digital cable. A few months pass and we've already filled our DVR, and I've taken the time to wire up the TVs to Composite video and S-Video for higher quality. Later on when DISH came out with their dual TV DVR units, we ordered one of those and we still have it. Another installer arrived with the DVR unit. They took the old PVR unit we had and installed our DVR for us, running some new Coax for it as well from the satellite switch and to the location of the TV we wanted to hook up as well. He also attached a DSL filter to our receiver since we had gotten DSL at this time, and activated the receiver. This receiver now has 100 hours of recording.
The satellite signal is rarely lost here. Even though my area is well known for large storms (Buffalo October Storm anyone?), the TV still works through thunderstorms, given it isn't raining too hard. During the Buffalo October Storm, we only lost three channels, which were local channels since the 61.5 satellite dish was being blocked with snow which was the first time we have ever lost part of the system because of an obstruction. Wasn't a problem with us as we could still get to our important local channels via the other dish which was perfectly fine.
Now about the HD. I don't have HD service here, but a family relative of mine does. They've been using satellite TV for ages now, 11 years maybe and recently they got a 1080p HDTV. When they got that, they ordered HD service with the $10 a month extra, and they also got a VIP-755 DVR Receiver that handles two TVs as well. It came with 300+ hours of SD recording space, and around 60 hours of HD recording space. The picture quality via HDMI from the receiver at 1080i looks really nice. The Sci-Fi channel looks very nice, which pleases me considering I like Stargate a lot. There is an Ethernet jack in the back of the receiver which I hear is for VOD and downloading shows to the hard drive via the internet, but right now that's not in use.
Overall, DISH Network is a great company to look into when considering your options for TV or switching from Cable or OTA. Yeah there may be those times where you'll lose the signal, but if it's not storm related, a quick call to Tech Support has always ended up with someone who knows what is going on, and what satellite is not working. It's very rare for a satellite to die anyways. The nice thing about the service as well that, unlike cable, if you have an RV or another vehicle of the sort, you can bring your service with you given you can align the dish properly, but the receiver can help with that should you need it and they have those auto-locking dishes as well that can do the work for you. Their receivers are pretty durable pieces of equipment with good software on them that is stable and easy to use. I recommend this TV provider to anyone, and if your Telco has this provider in their packaging, might as well bundle them with you as it will save you some cash.
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