I wanted to post our positive experience for others considering Dish. Unlike many posters on this site with glitches, issues, etc, I've been pleasantly surprised at how reliable and useful our service has been for the past month since we started. (Knock on wood!!) I looked over this forum before deciding to switch from Comcast after being on their Triple Play program for about 3 years. Cost containment was the main reason, but learning about the new Hopper/Joey made me think it made sense and be a big technological upgrade for our household. (We're paying about $80 less/month for TV/internet bundle--at least for this first year.) We only have one Hopper on a large HD TV in the family room and a Joey hooked up to a smaller HD screen in the living room and I'm amazed at the capacity. We have PTA running (to get Olympics coverage) and have over 103 other recordings (mostly movies with some multiple series--all in HD) and we're still only at 41% capacity! There'd be no way we could watch everything we've recorded! With Comcast, we had two DVRs on each TV with tiny hard drive capacity where we were constantly trying to make room for upcoming recordings. The Dish installation made me worry that we'd be in for a lot of issues as our installer couldn't get the Joey to connect to the Hopper. He worked for about 1.5 hours just trying to troubleshoot that. He finally went to his truck and pulled out a different Joey and that did the trick. Not a single glitch since--even after the s217 and other software updates. We have the Hopper connected to the internet via ethernet plugged into a powerline adapter because it's not close enough to our router. (Our internet is 20Mbs DSL, bundled through Dish) The Joey is joined to the Hopper without a HIC.
The graphical interface on the guide is great and is very easy to use. My wife has even been able to use the remote--something she never picked up with the Comcast system. Of course my teen-aged kids figured it out in seconds. And picture quality and audio seems better than it was with Comcast. The convenience of being able to start a show on one TV then pause and pick up on another is invaluable (and I know DirecTV has that too.) And the massive storage capacity is also a huge plus--never having to worry about whether you have the space to record something is great. Over the past 15 years, we've gone from DirecTV (when TiVo was bundled with their system), to Dish, Comcast and now back to Dish. If the system proves as reliable as it is now for the long haul and rates don't skyrocket, we'll probably stick with Dish for quite some time. I know there are probably a lot of other satisfied customers out there that never take the time to post. I use internet forums mostly to find answers to problems and that's why many come to this useful site. But it starts to skew the perception that everyone who has a Dish Hopper system has many frustrating problems. At least in our case, I'm surprised and happy to know that I haven't had those issues. Now, let the gremlins get to my system now that I've posted this glowing review....
The graphical interface on the guide is great and is very easy to use. My wife has even been able to use the remote--something she never picked up with the Comcast system. Of course my teen-aged kids figured it out in seconds. And picture quality and audio seems better than it was with Comcast. The convenience of being able to start a show on one TV then pause and pick up on another is invaluable (and I know DirecTV has that too.) And the massive storage capacity is also a huge plus--never having to worry about whether you have the space to record something is great. Over the past 15 years, we've gone from DirecTV (when TiVo was bundled with their system), to Dish, Comcast and now back to Dish. If the system proves as reliable as it is now for the long haul and rates don't skyrocket, we'll probably stick with Dish for quite some time. I know there are probably a lot of other satisfied customers out there that never take the time to post. I use internet forums mostly to find answers to problems and that's why many come to this useful site. But it starts to skew the perception that everyone who has a Dish Hopper system has many frustrating problems. At least in our case, I'm surprised and happy to know that I haven't had those issues. Now, let the gremlins get to my system now that I've posted this glowing review....
