Echostar Buying Sling Media > Nice

Nice

yeah, just imagine the pissed off people sitting in sunny florida trying to sling their snowy sat signal in stormy Kansas City. What a GREAT buy dish.
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"WHEN THE LAUGH TRACK STARTS THEN THE FUN STARTS!"

i see, so your signal never jumps studders or flat out drops when there is weather in the area. lucky you.
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"WHEN THE LAUGH TRACK STARTS THEN THE FUN STARTS!"

I have no worse issues with Dish than my parents have with Time Warner.

reply to inteller
Sure, when there's a really severe storm.

Still better than the general crap which is Comcast. (And that stutters or looks crappy ALL the time)

reply to inteller

reply to inteller
Mine doesn't, and I live in Tulsa as well.

Now, if a severe thunderstorm (Garden Variety doesn't cut it) passes directly south of me within a couple of miles the signal will drop out. Not snowy, it will be good up until it dies. This will last for 2-10 minutes depending on size of storm. It's happened to me at least 2 or 3 times in the last 8 years. Note that: 2-3 times in 8 years. So I'm looking at a max of 30 mins outage in 8 years. That's about as close to 99.99999% you can get.

Other then that, picture perfect 24/7 even in heavy snow.

OH and BTW one other point. Such thunderstorms regularly and often knock out Cable TV and broadband service. For hours or even days. Almost all cable in Tulsa proper is overhead and on poles. The storms nuke it.

In other words, in my experience, and given how stormy it can be here, Echostar owns Cox cable on service outages.

Last minute edit: Properly aligned dishes greatly minimize this problem. I did have some friends here who complained about losing service a lot in storms and weather. I checked their signal strength, and it was often yellow/bare minimum green.... ie dish was poorly aligned. Got up on roof and in about 5 minutes we had it solid green and about 25% better strength on the signal bar. They haven't complained since.

Funny, my apartment complex had a 30" dish pointed at 101 (for DirecTV) and it would go out several times a year when any sort of marginally severe storm passed over or just to the south of Bixby. Last year it went out for a long time in the snow/ice storm, and it wasn't due to accumulation on the dish.

Since they canned the satellite and put in the cable, I've had exactly one TV outage. The Internet service craps out a little more often than my DSL line did, though.

Of course, in south Tulsa, everything is buried, so wind damage isn't an issue. The people I know in midtown are constantly complaining about regular power outages.

I had satellite for 6 years, and regardless of the alignment of the dish, it crapped out on a regular basis, sometimes (slow moving storms) for an hour or more at a time. That's not to say I haven't had cable crap out for that long, though.

We can all go round and round about whose service has more outages, but the reality of the situation is that they both crap out on a semi-regular basis in most cases. I happen to be lucky with everything but electricity being underground, making actual wire more reliable than a dish. We're all just justifying our choices to ourselves.

My experience is only with Dish Network. I've never had DirecTV. I would imagine the technology is similar, but perhaps the difference in orbital slots or maybe the spectrum of the radio waves has some effect, I'm not sure.

I know that my Dish works great through thunderstorms, heavy rains, and snow.
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"Regulatory capitalism is when companies invest in lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians, instead of plant, people, and customer service." - former FCC Chairman William Kennard (A real FCC Chairman, unlike the current Corporate Spokesperson in the job!)