uWILLknow said:
No one will ever tell u this officially; But the phone line is required to assure u are using the 2nd tuner for ur same household, not feeding it to another household and sharing the monthly bill. This tends to happen alot more (but not specific to) with international customers who will send the 2nd tuner signal (TV2) to their brother, cousin, Parents or whoever's house nearby (usually an apartment type situation). This is called "account packing".
So you hook the phone up. How does Dish know if the TV2 output leads to another room or to a nearby neighbor? The dual output boxes are themselves the best thing Dish has done to prevent stacking as it is much easier to have a second receiver at a different location. But there's no "phone connected" waiver for those.
The "no phone" fee is not for all dual tuners. It is applied to the dual-tuner dual-output 322/522/625/942 boxes.
Here is a response I got a few weeks ago in
alt.dbs.echostar when trying to pin down what the fee is for. Bold emphasis is mine so you can find the answer in the middle of the corporate spin.
>The access fee has been understood to be for >keeping the smart card
number and associated >subscription information in the authorization
>stream.
This is the reason why Dish wants a phone line connected to all receivers,
but the fee itself is not to prevent account packing. There are millions
of receivers out there with PPV movies on the smart card that, since they
have never dialed out, those PPVs have never been paid for. This is in
addition to the thousands of people who are account packing. Dish is not
able to enforce this on all the receivers for the simple reason that they
didn't do that before, the same reason why the 501/508 do not have a DVR
fee but the 510 and later do.
With the dual tuners, the opportunity
presents itself in that you are already saving money. With a 322, you are
saving the additional outlet fee. With a 522/721/942 you are saving both
the additional outlet fee and an additional dvr fee. If you have a 522
vs. 2 510s, even without connecting a phone, you are saving 5 bucks.
>Dual-tuner receivers, including the dual-output >models, have only 1
smart card. That makes the >second tuner access (or "no phone") fee a
>marketing invention that is unjustified beyond >what is in the RCA.
This would be a valid argument were the fee called a smart card fee. You
still are tuning in to 2 seperate channels at once, which is what the
additional outlet fee is for.
>Dish needs to realize that the type of person who >is willing to dump
cable for satellite is also >the type who might be willing to dump POTS
for >other phone options. That people choose to save >money on their
phone service does not mean that >money is there for the taking.
When someone switches from cable to dish, there are certain advantages
they gain, and also certain things they are giving up. Generally, digital
satellite is less expensive than digital cable and may offer a wider
variety of channels, but digital cable has easier access to movies on
demand and often can offer bundled high speed internet. There are
trade-offs to any switch, and for some people it is worth it, for others
it's not. For those who have decided to only have a cell phone or
broadband phone, they have their own advantages. They don't pay for long
distance, or they can use their phone anywhere, or they are saving money
by not having both a cell phone and land line. These are all choices
people make, and Dish has no problem with that. But the trade off is that
you cannot have a dual tuner without paying an access fee for tuner 2.
Your alternative is to get 2 single tuners, and wind up paying the same or
more.
-- end post
