It seems Dish Network is full of lies to us lately.
Background:
We have been subscribers for 2 years with 3 boxes at home and 1 box at our weekend home. When we started the service we asked if we could use the account at both places and they said, "sure!" Not only that, they gave us the second dish and even installed it at our weekend home for free. Not only that, they let us pick up the Atlanta stations there, even though the weekend home is closer to another large city.
A few days ago we decided to plug in the phone line to the PVR so that we could get Caller ID on the TV. The following day we got a call from Dish.
The Call:
My mom gets a call asking her to read off all the IDs of the boxes so that they can update their records. My mom doesn't want to because she knows that Dish gave us the boxes - so they should know exactly what we have. They finally convinced her that this is Dish and so she read off the numbers of the three boxes here. The lady then said, "Can you get to the 4th box?" Mom, "No." The lady says, "oh, is it locked up in a room that you can't get to?". My mom said, "No, it is at our weekend home."
"Oh, we are going to have to turn that off, you can have a box at both locations." So they tricked my mom into saying we have a box at the weekend home - after having to go all over the house to read off information. They could have just asked, since they installed the weekend home box, she would have said, "yes we have one there."
Mom gets mad and finally says we will just switch to Comcast. The lady says, "Oh, Comcast is the reason we are having to do this - they are mad we are letting our customers have a single account at both homes." Excuse me? Since when does a company care what a jealous competitor thinks? The story changed a few minutes later to, "oh, the FCC is not letting us do this anymore." Uh huh.
Conclusions:
So now the connection at our weekend home has been cut off. My dad called today to say that we have brought the forth box home, but Dish said, "oh, you are listed as having a weekend home. We are not able to activate any more boxes for you, and have disconnected one." Dad, "So we can't have more than three boxes at our main house?". Dish says, "No. We are limiting all people with a weekend home on file to just three boxes. What kind of service is that?
Questions:
1. Are any other Dish subscribers with a weekend/summer home having this problem? Based on the timing, we feel that plugging in the phone line is what caused all of this to happen.
2. With the lack of service at our weekend home, the trickery and lies, and the loss of Lifetime - we are done with Dish Network, although we had previously always liked them. Does anybody recommend (or not) DirectTV or Comcast or should we just go with our local cable company and TiVo?
3. For now, can we move the card in one of our boxes to the box that is at the weekend home? Does the card determine the active/inactive information - or does the box itself? We could go back and forth with the card, if that works.
Thanks!