This is not true for all areas. Where I am at the fees and taxes alone would be almost 10.00 a month for your basic phone service. What I have is a limited phone with DSL that allows unlimited incoming calls, free 911 and 800 number calls, local calls are billed at 10 cents a minute, long distance calls are not possible. This cost me about 10.00 more than if I just had DSL alone. A regular phone line without any other services is over 30 dollars a month here.
Insane Dish Hardware Upgrade via Phone Conversation?
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This is not true for all areas. Where I am at the fees and taxes alone would be almost 10.00 a month for your basic phone service. What I have is a limited phone with DSL that allows unlimited incoming calls, free 911 and 800 number calls, local calls are billed at 10 cents a minute, long distance calls are not possible. This cost me about 10.00 more than if I just had DSL alone. A regular phone line without any other services is over 30 dollars a month here.
Not sure about your area, but I called to cancel my land-line and AT&T offered me a $10 a month limited usage plan. I canceled anyway.
To be fair, no I am not. However its still the 'too hard, too impractical, and too expensive' reason for not finding a way to overcome these things and make it happen with the desired results. Heard it before and will hear it again. By anecdote, there were techs and engineers that said a certain totally unstable and non-aerodynamic airplane would never fly... until those problems were overcome and it did. The ones who believed it could be done were added to the program. And no it was neither cheap nor easy.
The car analogy is imperfect and such things always are. But it took too many years for the car companies to bite the bullet and retool to build better products. I am sure at the time there were plenty of techs who had negative reactions to fuel injection in anything but specialized cars while others saw it as a necessity for all cars. Same with American car companies that chose to go the SUV route because of their markup and are now playing catchup with the growing demand for hybrids. Set your goal and find a way to do it. But of course that wont mean a thing if that goal isnt there to begin with.
Technical arguments aside, I dont believe any company that says it cant do something. To me its just another way of saying it wont.
I have a basic land line with ATT for 10.00 for UNLIMITED local calling, with no extras, no caller id, no caller forwarding, no nothing ,except an extra 2.00 for an hour of long distance a month and my internet is dsl -middle speed at 29.99 and I pay around $55.00 a month With taxes included , for all of the above.
I don't know which company you are using by I have ATT and my basic line is only 10.00 for UNLIMITED local calling , 2.00 for an hour of long distance, 29.99 for dsl -middle speed ,for only $55.00 a month, with Taxes included. I use my cell phone for most of my long distance calls.
No such animal in my area. The big cities around me have Verizon and AT&T and all the different packages but I'm in a rural area with one take it or leave it phone plan. No naked DSL available either so I have to have the voice service. Else I'd just have cell service.
I am really not on is either side of this argument. If Dish calls and I cannot deal with it, I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. I am neither defending nor condemning anyone.
I am curious about what made you draw a conclusion about our costs if someone was 'stacking'. The statement implies that Dish has a fixed profit requirement and if they cannot get it with current subs and revenues that they'll raise prices.
I'm sure the reality is that Dish is going to charge the most they can get away with without losing customers. It doesn't matter if they eliminate all cheating. They are going to raise rates as much as they can anyway.
I could be wrong. If you have evidence to the contrary, I would be interested to see it.
There has been considerable discussion on this thread about alternate means of catching stackers. These all miss the point. In a competitive environment, a company cannot consider its customers to be all thieves just waiting to be caught. For one thing it is untrue and that way of thinking is poison for any company. A monopoly can get away with that attitude for a while, but eventually something intervenes such as government. A company has to find some means of encouraging the small percentage of cheaters to comply, but there is no such thing as 0% or 100% so there will always be some small number of thieves which must be tolerated.
I have an example: Some of you can remember when prerecorded videotapes were very expensive (over $100 for the first Star Wars movie tape). As a result, most could not afford to buy the tapes and there appeared to be a great amount of copying with a black market in cheaper tapes of movies. The movie studios were in a losing battle to stamp out the copying and illicit trade of their videotaped movies; they treated their customers like thieves even though the vast majority did nothing illegal, and a great number of customers came to regard the movie industry as contemptible because of their heavy handed tactics. Paramount figured it out. They began to sell all of their prerecorded movies for under $20. The movies were affordable for virtually all customers, and there was no longer an incentive for copying and the black market. To be sure, there were sill copies being made, but the number was so small as to be tolerable.
Dish Network could offer more, smaller tiers. Better yet, they could offer complete a la carte programming that I used to have back when I used 4DTV over C-Band. The consumer could get exactly the programs he wants without having to pay for a collection of programs useless to him. With the current tier structure and a small number of large tiers, a customer may to have pay what he considers unreasonable prices just to get the relatively small amount programming he wants. A la carte programming ensures that the customer gets exactly what he wants for a reasonable cost and greatly reduces the incentive to stack. This is just one example encouraging all customers to do the right thing rather than regarding all customers as criminals; maybe you have other ideas?
Otherwise, I propose that DirecTV fund the Dish Network Audit Team. This can only enhance DirecTV profits and quicken the demise of Dish Network.
I have an example: Some of you can remember when prerecorded videotapes were very expensive (over $100 for the first Star Wars movie tape). As a result, most could not afford to buy the tapes and there appeared to be a great amount of copying with a black market in cheaper tapes of movies. The movie studios were in a losing battle to stamp out the copying and illicit trade of their videotaped movies; they treated their customers like thieves even though the vast majority did nothing illegal, and a great number of customers came to regard the movie industry as contemptible because of their heavy handed tactics. Paramount figured it out. They began to sell all of their prerecorded movies for under $20. The movies were affordable for virtually all customers, and there was no longer an incentive for copying and the black market. To be sure, there were sill copies being made, but the number was so small as to be tolerable.
Dish Network could offer more, smaller tiers. Better yet, they could offer complete a la carte programming that I used to have back when I used 4DTV over C-Band. The consumer could get exactly the programs he wants without having to pay for a collection of programs useless to him. With the current tier structure and a small number of large tiers, a customer may to have pay what he considers unreasonable prices just to get the relatively small amount programming he wants. A la carte programming ensures that the customer gets exactly what he wants for a reasonable cost and greatly reduces the incentive to stack. This is just one example encouraging all customers to do the right thing rather than regarding all customers as criminals; maybe you have other ideas?
Otherwise, I propose that DirecTV fund the Dish Network Audit Team. This can only enhance DirecTV profits and quicken the demise of Dish Network.
You don't think a Company has a profit strategy in their Business Plan, and base their profit margins to compensate for what their investigations on hacking or account stacking have proven?
The hacking and account stacking has to be widespread enough, for them to justify the cost of running an audit team.
I live at the border of Canada. All you need to do is drive over the border and see literally thousands of homes with E* and D* dishes upon the roofs. Card reprograming was an industry in Ontario, until it was recently shut down in the last year or so. I know of many people at work, whom had "cheater card" systems, mainly for D*. D* would zap their cards every so often, and then they would have to drive back over the border and get their card reprogramed.
Now there is no way in the world, you can tell me and expect me to believe you that the "honest subscriber" whom isn't account stacking or using reprogramed cards; isn't paying for all these efforts by both Dish and Directv to eliminate the thief of service. These costs, along with the costs of programing and equipment, are passed onto the consumer, as a cost of doing business. How much I doubt the general public or consumer will never know.
On the other hand, maybe there is no audit team at all, and just a few a Dishnetwork/Echostar employees whom lurk on this website and post whinning comments about an audit team, so the account stackers cease and desist.
Remember that well when I worked in a video store. The first movies to come out cheaply were old ones by some of the smaller movie studios and were also all recorded at EP to cut down on the cost. They were relatively successful and eventually the bigger studios followed suit as soon as they saw the sales numbers roll in and how many people were buying used rentals. But even then new releases didnt come out cheap at first. They were still released at $100 to sell as rentals. Eventually they were lowered with the idea that the people that already rented would also now buy. Of course the price of used rentals dropped accordingly also.
Off topic but on the subject of thieves and video: One day a new customer signed up. He wanted to rent an out of print and very hard to find laser disc. A Disney movie. The credit cards of new customers were always checked to make sure they were valid and his was. SOP. Well this guy skipped with the disc (his one and only rental) thinking his card would be charged face value of the disc or even as a cheap used rental. It really was a collectors item and if it were up to me I would have pulled it from the shelves entirely. After some discussion and deciding what the replacement cost would have been... assuming one could be found... we charged his credit card 3x retail and also the max that could be charged for late fees. He must have really wanted it because he never came back to dispute it. Nor did he tell his credit card company to do a chargeback or else we would have immediately sent it to the collection agency.
However, even with guys like that it would have been bad business to treat all customers as thieves. Typical theft was written off at the end of the month as accounting notations and the cost of doing business little different than missing inventory. We were much more concerned about things like collecting large late fees since that directly affected the numbers at the end of the month. One thing that did change however was the amount a credit card was checked for with new signups. Originally it was just a small number because such checks generally place holds on that amount for a short time. It did get bumped up to $100 to make sure there was enough to charge for scams like this and that the card wasnt almost maxed out. The Dish audit guys have a job to do but it sounds like there is some kind of paranoia about even one person stealing from them.
If either DBS company did not take reasonable precautions to stop piracy & stacking then they would be robbed blind. This is definitely a problem and the honest customer ends up footing the bill for the thieves as in any business. That said it does not mean that E* or D* for that matter should mistreat their good customers that might end up being audited. I would think that they could be audited without resorting to these tactics. I have two receivers and have only one hooked to a phone line and have never been audited, don't know why. The thing that I wonder about is if the phone line is telling E* where the receivers are, how is this affecting the "movers"? Even if you have caller ID blocked they can see where you're calling from.
I only read through part of the first page and the last for this thread so if this was asked or answered previously, sorry.
If your DishNet service is terminated by the audit team while you are in a contract will you have to pay the early termination fee?
We used to have six receivers, two of them owned but now have five leased after they did away with our two owned 721s. We have been audited twice both times after I have had to deal with dish about something or added a receiver.
If your DishNet service is terminated by the audit team while you are in a contract will you have to pay the early termination fee?
We used to have six receivers, two of them owned but now have five leased after they did away with our two owned 721s. We have been audited twice both times after I have had to deal with dish about something or added a receiver.
I don't think that's the case with E*. They are SUSPICIOUS of certain customers that meet a certain criteria - that is all. I'm pretty certain they've spent HOURS laying out this criteria. I'm pretty sure they've seen it all and have determined what might indicate stacking as well as other issues.
I'm a 20yr programmer/analyst. I've written so many fraud detection applications over the years it makes my head spin. You wouldn't believe some of the criteria they've come up with. I, like you, think the companies I've worked for (I'm sure it's not that different from other companies) spend more time on this than is necessary, but the common theme is, all of them thought/think it's a HUGE deal.
I can't give you legal advice about your specific situation, but in general, I would expect any major money-hungry company to try and wring money out of you in this situation.
That said, I would expect a very easy time of it in small claims court if they actually did so if *they* canceled your account. ETF language trying to impose a fee on a unilateral cancel usually isn't looked at favorably by small claims judges - largely because that gives the company an incentive to cancel you and keep your money, while providing you no services or anything in return.
The counterargument is that you're in default because of "hacking" or whatever - but if you can even swing a shred of a showing that you weren't and/or the termination was unilateral on their part, you'll be fine.
Were this to go to district court or higher, I wouldn't care to prognosticate on that, but in small claims, it's open and shut.
Regarding my previous post quoted in the last post--We have been audited twice but I was able to pass the audits (they are not trying to terminate out account). We are mostly happy with dish. It is just a pain going to each receiver and reading off the numbers they ask for. I was just curious if you would have to pay the early termination fee if they terminated you.
Knowing Dish and their fee structure, it wouldn't surprise me if they did and if they charged double or triple the normal early termination fee.
My boxes are hooked up to the phone line over vonage, but I have to admit this..
One time, when I was on vacation for a month, and we were transitioning from our old dish account to the new one, I had the old boxes off over a month, and when we got home not only were they deactivated, but I got calls from the auditors (I saw the caller ID)..
Funny thing is, when I plugged them in, I hooked them up to the phone line, and after a day or two they.. re-authorized! STRANGE BUT TRUE.
One time, when I was on vacation for a month, and we were transitioning from our old dish account to the new one, I had the old boxes off over a month, and when we got home not only were they deactivated, but I got calls from the auditors (I saw the caller ID)..
Funny thing is, when I plugged them in, I hooked them up to the phone line, and after a day or two they.. re-authorized! STRANGE BUT TRUE.
They did you a favor because Direct will install a HD system for you free of charge. If you would have upgraded to HD at Dish they would have charged you a few hundred bucks. That's another Dish policy for driving customers away.
