It’s always been one owned one leased, which makes since the leased one would be the one that is most advantageous to Dish and the one the system will automatically choose to charge the highest fee against.
The problem is that the fee for a leased one is exactly the same, regardless of whether it is the primary or secondary one. If it is the primary, then it gets charged the DVR fee. If it is the secondary, it gets charged the leased receiver fee. Either way, that would be $15. So, Dish's billing system may not have been set up to distinguish between the two Hopper 3's (giving one priority over the other) since prior to this year's changes, it made absolutely no difference as far as the amount being billed.
However, the situation unique to the Hopper 3 is that Dish
required the second Hopper 3 to be purchased. So, everybody with two Hopper 3's is going to have at least one purchased one.
If Dish's billing system
is set up to give one type of receiver (leased or owned) a priority, then the system may have been set up to automatically make the purchased one the primary receiver. This may have made sense to Dish at the time, since the leased one would be seen as a secondary one that can be removed at any time and returned to Dish, while the purchased one is yours to keep. However, such a system would result in the billing issue being reported in this thread. Such logic would also be the exact opposite of how most people with purchased receivers likely use them, as they would prefer to remove and add the purchased receiver at will in order to avoid the requirement to return it. However, as I stated, most people with purchased Hopper 3's probably did not specifically purchase it because of the convenience of wanting to be able to remove it at any time. Rather, they wanted to have two Hopper 3's and keep them active all of the time, but simply were not allowed to lease both of them.
The billing issue also gets more tricky, and may in fact be unique to just the Hopper 3, since the Hopper 3 has always had the $15 DVR fee. Other models of Hopper have gone through more than one round of grandfathering. So, the DVR fee for those models will vary, depending on when you first signed up or switched to using that model. Therefore, Dish would have more reason to pay attention and be careful about which one of those Hoppers is the primary, due to the DVR fee grandfathering. Again, before this year's changes, it never made any difference as far as the Hopper 3 was concerned. (The other Hopper model with no such grandfathering to worry about is the Hopper Duo with its $10 DVR fee. However, the Hopper Duo is also not subject to any discount toward the fee for a secondary purchased one, as already discussed earlier in this thread.)
Now, we get to those customers who are set up with a $5 discount toward that DVR fee, due to agreeing to a two-year contract. That discount naturally would have been applied to the primary receiver, since that was the one with the DVR fee. However, as I speculated above, the purchased receiver may have been set up as the primary by default. The problem with this year's purchased receiver fee discounts is that it
should have switched the leased receiver to being the primary, since it would now be the one with the highest fee. Unfortunately, if Dish's system still has the $5 discount tied to the
purchased receiver (which should now only be $5) then that would result in effectively a $0 fee for a
secondary receiver. (Also, the system would now be trying to apply a DVR fee discount to a specific receiver that is now no longer being charged a DVR fee, due to being switched to being the secondary receiver.) Dish's system would then see this as an error, and switch the priority back the other way. This gives the purchased receiver a high enough fee (and the proper type of fee) to qualify for the DVR fee discount, but also results in the secondary receiver (the leased one) being the one that is now subject to the higher $15 fee. (Again, this is similar to the Hopper Duo situation I mentioned above, where the primary Hopper Duo has a $10 DVR fee, but the purchased secondary Hopper Duo still has a $15 fee.)
As I speculated in previous posts, taking one of the problematic receivers completely off of your account, and replacing it with a different Hopper that has never been tied to your account, may be the only way to get Dish's billing for your account to reset, so that you are then charged properly going forward.
