Satellite vs. cable

[Sadoun]

I'm seriously thinking of switching from cable to satellite. My questions are how reliable is the satellite reception and will the weather effect the signal (cloud cover, snow)? Is there any maintenance required? What pitfalls should I look out for.

TIA

With satellite TV you will notice the picture quality is much better than cable. Also, with satellite TV you will get more channels for less money. Most of the newer channels will apprear on satellite before cable in general. Also, satellite has more HD channels than cable.

If the dish is installed and aligned correctly, you will hardly notice any or have any outage due to weather.

If you order Dish Network or DirecTV service and you have many TVs, I would recommend you also get the service plan. It's around $6/mon extra but covers equipment and service.

 

[mattopia]

In terms of PQ... I think standard definition channels look like crap on cable and DISH. It's different kind of crap though. Cable still uses analog for most of their non-HD channels (except stuff like G4 that's in the 100's and up). The analog channels from my cable company look soft, fuzzy, almost blurry.

DISH channels are all digital, but they're still low resolution. This looks crappy when streached to fill the native resolution of an HDTV. So, it's not as blurry, it's more... pixelated? Not sure of the best term for it.

Me, I try to watch HD only whenever possible. From that perspective, although I've only been back with DISH for a few days now, HD picture quality looks very comparable between the two. And while content on most of the networks is hit and miss, the Voom channels always look good to me.

 

[tdti1]

With satellite TV you will notice the picture quality is much better than cable.

This is only for a ghetto cable setups, those in a well maintained and up to date cable area will have way better picture and sound than poor pizza dish video, mini dish has very bad picture quality due to over compression and funky resolutions, HD lite is what people get with pizza dish.

Now if you are talking about real satellite TV like the satellite distribution feeds off 4dtv and dvb then you are right, to bad consumers will never gain access to most of those feeds.

FiOS also blows away pizza dish big time.

 

[TomT223]

Good point... I had Comcast's number memorized after dialing it so much for different service and picture problems.

LOL. I still have it memorized. It's funny, for probably 20 years I had Time Warner and no real problems. Then Comcast took over last spring and everything went downhill. I can't begin to tell you how many people I know that have switched to satellite in the last 6 months. I'd be suprised if Comcast stays in business.

 

[harshness]

Not so often now.. Many cable companies get channels from fiber optics nowadays, especially when it comes to On Demand channels. Not to say they don't still use the dish farms too, but cable companies used to be totally reliant on them. Now it's a mixture.

Except for the regional programming, my local Comcast gets all of their content from satellite. Last time it snowed wet and sloppy (as it does only once every four years or so here), we lost all the nationals on cable. All of our regional programming is terrestrial (probably networked).

Obviously, the VOD content is stored locally.

 

[harshness]

With satellite TV you will notice the picture quality is much better than cable.

This is one of those YMMV things. For the analog channels, cable is often much better. For digital channels, it is often a wash.

 

[tigerfan33]

When I had cable, the digital on my hdtv was a great pic. Satellite is compressed and looks very soft and unwatchable at times. I switched because of hd. Do I miss cable because of the much more clear digtal? hell no. The service was very bad and with no additions of hd channels in almost 3 years, I was glad to leave.

 

[Jared Twomey]

at least with Charter cable here... they use satellites to pick up a lot of their programming... They have a Dish farm a little ways outside of town. So when my satellite goes out, a lot of times theres does also.

 

[yellowcanary73]

Mine goes out if its barely sprinkling sometimes its not even raining around McKinney Tx.

 

[JEFFinINDY]

My neighbors called me last Sunday, right before the Colts game, and asked if my TV was working. They said their picture was all snowy. I told them I had no problems, but that I didn't have Comcast anymore. The next three mornings there were Comcast trucks in the neighborhood each morning, so I'm guessing there was another outage or serious picture quality issue (although my Comcast Internet was working fine).

A few years ago in Indianapolis, the year that Friends wrapped up its run, Comcast had a city-wide 100% outage on that Thursday night when all the big shows were having their season and series finales. There was so much outrage that they got permission from the networks to rebroadcast the shows on an unused analog SD channel a few days later.

Good times...

 

[tdti1]

at least with Charter cable here... they use satellites to pick up a lot of their programming... They have a Dish farm a little ways outside of town. So when my satellite goes out, a lot of times theres does also.

75% of feeds on cable and mini dish come off of C-band, they should not have rain fade issues, unless they are using the HITS platform to save costs, this is on Ku-band basically just like using Dish or DTV at the headend except the pic off HITS is a touch less compressed but once the cable company recompresses it and sends it to customers then it will look very bad, this of course is a typical ghetto, cheap or small mom and pop type cable system, a cable headend that gets all the distribution feeds off C-band and barely compresses it before sending it out will have a very noticeable quality advantage over small dish.

At times pixalation can also occur on a poor setup cable system or if they are having issues at there end, though this does not mean the broadcaster of the distribution feed is having problems as that is very rare and is most probably a local issue.

 

[skyroniter]

Mine goes out if its barely sprinkling sometimes its not even raining around McKinney Tx.

I've had Dish now for a couple months. Had problems losing signal during rain storms. I read about King's Rain Shield in another thread around here and ordered some. No loss at all during the last rain storm, which was a pretty strong one. So far so good.