Freeze your account for up to six months.

[vaylon]

Dish seems to be offering people who are out of contract, the option to have their account froze for $5 a month, for up to 6 months.
You still get to keep your equipment and if you have a dvr, you still get to use it for your recordings and over the air recording.

Seems like a pretty good deal for those that have a tight budget and need to cut back on expenses for a while and not loose the package they have.

Five bucks a month sounds pretty fair just to be able to use the DVR function.

From what I have heard, its just 5 bucks total. No lease fee or anything else except tax.

It's probably also a big YMMV .

 

[MikeD-C05]

Why not offer to allow people to keep the Welcome Pack , that DISH did away with this year? It had your locals and 20 random channels from all different packs and it was only $14.99 a month. Why not do away with the excessive additional receiver fees they came out with last February that put an additional dual tuner at $17.00 each? How about standardizing their receiver fees all at $5.00 once again like the competition does? DISH could do many things to help people with their bills and add value to their customers too. Instead they make changes on the surface that sounds good but have built in hidden costs. The elimination of the dvr fee per dvr, and the whole account dvr fee, sounded good ,but it turned out the extra dvr fee was added into the additional receiver fee along with the made up tv 2 connection fee. DISH needs to return to it's roots and be the low priced leader on programming and equipment costs as well. Then desperate measures like pausing your account wouldn't be necessary to keep subs out of commitment.

 

[Bob Haller]

Why not offer to allow people to keep the Welcome Pack , that DISH did away with this year? It had your locals and 20 random channels from all different packs and it was only $14.99 a month. Why not do away with the excessive additional receiver fees they came out with last February that put an additional dual tuner at $17.00 each? How about standardizing their receiver fees all at $5.00 once again like the competition does? DISH could do many things to help people with their bills and add value to their customers too. Instead they make changes on the surface that sounds good but have built in hidden costs. The elimination of the dvr fee per dvr, and the whole account dvr fee, sounded good ,but it turned out the extra dvr fee was added into the additional receiver fee along with the made up tv 2 connection fee. DISH needs to return to it's roots and be the low priced leader on programming and equipment costs as well. Then desperate measures like pausing your account wouldn't be necessary to keep subs out of commitment.

:up:up

plus it makes E look better keeping their churn lower.,

good for E bad for customers

 

[DJdish]

"Dish Pause" they call it, Couple of years ago and due to my temporary living in Europe Dish offered me this as you describe it, it´s a good option for those who want to keep their Dish connection and account, etc but reduce the fee either due to a temporary overseas assignment (where there is no signal and thus no sense in bringing the receiver) or due to a tight budget, but again is temporary, the guys at Dish told me after the 6 months they turn on automatically the programming package previously indicated on the account.

 

[samalex]

Dish seems to be offering people who are out of contract, the option to have their account froze for $5 a month, for up to 6 months.
You still get to keep your equipment and if you have a dvr, you still get to use it for your recordings and over the air recording.

Seems like a pretty good deal for those that have a tight budget and need to cut back on expenses for a while and not loose the package they have.

Five bucks a month sounds pretty fair just to be able to use the DVR function.

From what I have heard, its just 5 bucks total. No lease fee or anything else except tax.

It's probably also a big YMMV .

Yup, it's Dish Pause, and we used it when we had our house built earlier this year and had to move into an apartment for a few months. We just boxed-up the DVR for about 4 months and after moving into the new house we test drove Time Warner Cable for a month before dropping it and calling Dish to get is reconnected. (TW was crap compared to Dish.) The total cost was $5/month, and they installed the Dish at no cost to the new house and got us up and going.

The only bummer is they can't keep your old package, so if you had an awesome package that's no longer available before going to Dish Pause, you'll have to choose one of the available packages when re-activating the account. We had one of the Turbo HD packages with a decent selection but were only paying about $47/month (programming, HD Platinum, plus all fee's, taxes, DVR, etc). When I re-enabled the plan the CSR signed me up for American HD Gold which he said was equal, but my monthly went up to over $70/month since our old plan wasn't available. I just spent the extra $10 or so and went up to the Top 250 package.

Sam

 

[Laddyboy]

Yup, it's Dish Pause, and we used it when we had our house built earlier this year and had to move into an apartment for a few months. We just boxed-up the DVR for about 4 months and after moving into the new house we test drove Time Warner Cable for a month before dropping it and calling Dish to get is reconnected. (TW was crap compared to Dish.) The total cost was $5/month, and they installed the Dish at no cost to the new house and got us up and going.

The only bummer is they can't keep your old package, so if you had an awesome package that's no longer available before going to Dish Pause, you'll have to choose one of the available packages when re-activating the account. We had one of the Turbo HD packages with a decent selection but were only paying about $47/month (programming, HD Platinum, plus all fee's, taxes, DVR, etc). When I re-enabled the plan the CSR signed me up for American HD Gold which he said was equal, but my monthly went up to over $70/month since our old plan wasn't available. I just spent the extra $10 or so and went up to the Top 250 package.

Sam

If you had one of the HD Turbo packages it was still available. They just changed the name to Dish America. If you had HD Absolute, it is no longer available.

 

[superdorf]

Why not offer to allow people to keep the Welcome Pack , that DISH did away with this year? It had your locals and 20 random channels from all different packs and it was only $14.99 a month. Why not do away with the excessive additional receiver fees they came out with last February that put an additional dual tuner at $17.00 each? How about standardizing their receiver fees all at $5.00 once again like the competition does? DISH could do many things to help people with their bills and add value to their customers too. Instead they make changes on the surface that sounds good but have built in hidden costs. The elimination of the dvr fee per dvr, and the whole account dvr fee, sounded good ,but it turned out the extra dvr fee was added into the additional receiver fee along with the made up tv 2 connection fee. DISH needs to return to it's roots and be the low priced leader on programming and equipment costs as well. Then desperate measures like pausing your account wouldn't be necessary to keep subs out of commitment.

All the reasons that I am switching to Direct next week.

 

[MikeD-C05]

All the reasons that I am switching to Direct next week.

Yes, I can see why . I just hope you are happy with Directv and you don't try to cancel early. Their cancellation fees are huge if you do.

 

[toddhawk]

I guess I must've been one of their best customers. I was a Americas 250 w/Platinum HD and was only a year into my 2 year agreement (but had been with Dish for 4 years... agreement came with moving into a new town and house). I lost my job and moved back to my old hometown (still owned my house there - my daughter and grandkids now lived there and already had DISH hooked up). So they put me on Dish pause for 8 months until I got a job in another new town. They installed for free and away I went. I see a lot of griping about DISH and I just don't get it. They've been very fair and easy to work with. I don't expect miracles but compared to everything else I deal with, DISH has been absolutely great (although a few CSRs require a bit of patience but no issue there). As long as I have line of sight (in a town house now - will buy a house in 6 months and Dish will have to move me again) I just haven't seen ANYTHING that comes close to beating DISH. I just don't get all the complaining.
Todd

 

[superdorf]

Yes, I can see why . I just hope you are happy with Directv and you don't try to cancel early. Their cancellation fees are huge if you do.

I had Direct for 3 years prior to my current run with dish.. I was satisfied then... I'm actually happy to be getting some upgraded equipment without a huge cost too.

I'm NOT looking forward to calling to cancel though... Yuck.

 

[sbsi]

Why not offer to allow people to keep the Welcome Pack , that DISH did away with this year? It had your locals and 20 random channels from all different packs and it was only $14.99 a month. Why not do away with the excessive additional receiver fees they came out with last February that put an additional dual tuner at $17.00 each? How about standardizing their receiver fees all at $5.00 once again like the competition does? DISH could do many things to help people with their bills and add value to their customers too. Instead they make changes on the surface that sounds good but have built in hidden costs. The elimination of the dvr fee per dvr, and the whole account dvr fee, sounded good ,but it turned out the extra dvr fee was added into the additional receiver fee along with the made up tv 2 connection fee. DISH needs to return to it's roots and be the low priced leader on programming and equipment costs as well. Then desperate measures like pausing your account wouldn't be necessary to keep subs out of commitment.

Any info from Dish on when the Welcome Pack will be gone for existing customers??? The Family Package is already gone and that was 2nd to the cheapest package for Dish.

 

[samalex]

If you had one of the HD Turbo packages it was still available. They just changed the name to Dish America. If you had HD Absolute, it is no longer available.

Yeah, it's still there and quite a bit more per month. I didn't mind having a limited channel list and no access to the music channels for $47/month but after Dish Pause and moving to Dish American Gold our monthly bill went up to about $75/month. I didn't see any reason to pay that much and get such a limited selection, so we just moved up to the American Top 250 for about $10 more.

 

[MikeD-C05]

Any info from Dish on when the Welcome Pack will be gone for existing customers??? The Family Package is already gone and that was 2nd to the cheapest package for Dish.

IF you have the Welcome pack and you make NO changes to your programming , you can keep it , for NOW. My aunt has it on my third account with DISH. But it is not offered anymore for new subs. It was a good way to keep people with DISH, who can't afford to pay more than $14.99 a month. With this pack gone, as well as family pack gone, the cheapest pack you can go with is the top 120 at $39.99 a month or DISH America hd only pack at $29.99 a month. Still cheaper than DIRECTV but no real choices unless you own your receivers and then you can go with no programming pack at $6.00 and then add premium movie channel packs or Encore pack ala carte.

 

[sbsi]

Agree, Direct TV cost the most and then, cable.

 

[SteveRiz]

It's also for people in a contract. They will just extend you currect contract the amount of months you put the account on hold.

Fair!..Even at $5/month

 

[KKlare]

For Dish Pause, what about your EHD (external hard drive)--Will it remain enabled?
What about 3 Duo HD receivers?

I have 900 HD, 200 TCM up converts, 400 SD and a lot of series on EHD--more than I can watch in 6 months. So I would only miss news and new series. I could save a lot.
-Ken