MAJOR brain fart. I meant to say Sling. I know the adapter is only for Dish. Thank you for the OTA info. That means keeping my Sony DHG500 or buying another DTV Pal DVR or similar. I don't think the Sony is long for this world, OTA wise.
I've now gotten "determined." I will, one way or another, beat the information out of them on their product "Fios." They actually appear to intend to keep it all a secret, by not training their CSRs, and dare I say, firing any that learn anything. I will learn how it compares to Dish DVRs. I will learn how a second HDTV, or even a third SDTV or HDTV would connect, at what cost and features. I will learn if the failure of the DVR means the loss of EHD programs. I will learn the costs, both with a 2 year contract, and the costs after that contract, or initially without a contract. And if I can try it for a month, then commit to two years with full savings. And I will learn about a skip forward and skip back button features, which seem utterly unfathomable to their CSRs. And I will learn which HD channels I get with Dish will only be SD with Fios (I've almost got that one!). Remote access? Well, forget that one.
Nobody's that incompetent. They're deliberately not training their people. They must want the stupid or clueless X percent of customers. Yet every week, at least, I get a "great offer" that actually explains nothing, trying to get me to switch to Fios TV.
I'll do all this, simply because I've been led to believe they are trying their best to ensure the new customer has no idea what he's getting in to. And I view it as a challenge. At this point, I KNOW I can count on absolutely no help whatsoever from Fios, in the event of trouble. And I thought Cox was bad. This alone makes it exceedingly unlikely I will switch. But - there are local interest channels of importance to my wife (Fairfax County channels). And there MIGHT be significant savings, AFTER the 2 year "good deal." To leave Dish after 10 years, and happy service, would be difficult, but not impossible. I am dumbfounded by the lack of knowledge and customer service available by phone or chat. And I've been repeatedly lied to by relatively senior people in Fios that I've talked with face to face. They might have a good product, but they're hiding it behind a wall of stupidity. I really find it difficult to believe that I can't get straight answers to what I consider simple questions!
The thing is not that they are trying to hide the facts, its that the CSR's usually don't have the services themselves. Remember Fios is still in a pretty limited area around the nation, so where ever thier call centers are they might not even be able to get it in their homes. The first CSR told me as much. The second one I called was better.
But I can answer most those questions with the exception of the EHD one.
Anyway, with the skip forward and back, its the same as dish, with the exception that you can customize it. In menus-settings-dvr you will see skip and replay where you can set the time it skips forward or back, you can chose 10sec, 30sec, 1min, or 5 min for each. I have set to 30sec skip and 10sec skip back since I was used to that on dish. The new software also has chaptering of a recording, if you enable this when you watch a program you just hit arrow up and the chapters will come up, they vary from 3min chapters and up, depending on the length of the program. I recorded a two hour program last night and the chapters are 10min long, they show up as a row of thumbnails so you can skip ahead easily to a part like a bluray. Another thing that is different is that the arrow buttons will not work for changing channels like the dish remote, still getting used to that, lol.
As far as the hd channels, you are going to have a hard time really comparing everything. You should really just write down all the channels you must have in hd, and sd that you have on dish and see if fios has them. Really depends on what you want, not the number each of them throws around. For instance, if you like sports then fios will be better as the rsn is full time hd, and they have all the ESPN channels in HD. If you don't watch sports, then who cares. If you must have BBCA HD then don't get fios, they don't have it. Thats what we did, and BBC America was pretty much the only one we would miss from our package, but we also gained a bunch like MSNBC, others listed
here, snice our package was Dish Latino Max. If you have AT250 then it will be different.
With the contract and no contract pricing, they are pretty much the same the first year, but you get one of those special offers if you sign a contract. The contract also locks in your price for the two years. But if you have no contract and the price increase is a lot, you can just leave. Maybe you can get a credit if you call up, leaves your options open. Or if they lose a channel you can leave, that's why we chose no contract.
In terms of comparing the DVRs, how do you expect them to tell you that? You have to use them in order to tell. Anyway, the new Dvrs for fios are very nice. They are fast and have the same user space for recordings as the hopper, I will post more on this later. How do they connect? through the router. I believe even if you don't get internet you still get a fios router to use moca. So you just need one cord to the box, you don't need an Ethernet cord, they speak to each other over the coax wire. and if you have more then one dvr you can watch recordings from any of them on any tv. the one thing you do need is good wires, if they are really old the boxes wont work. If your dish works then you will be fine, but we had one room that still had wire from the cox days, with dish it was used for a tv 2 out so it worked, i doubt it would have worked with dish otherwise. It did not work with fios and we had to split the room next door and run it to the second room, we will be putting it through the wall today ourselves as we did not want to pay $120 for them to do it. But the installer gave us the wire for it. The cost is $19.99 for the home dvr, you only need one and the other dvrs are then $15.99. The STB are 9.99 with discounts if you get more then one or one with a home dvr, they are for sd and hd, they don't have sd only boxes any longer. This is all on the
website, just look around, with one home dvr and 2 stbs you get $6 off a month. Each one you add brings down the per box cost. And they seem high, and they are, but remember with dish you are also paying DVR fee, Home DVR fee, and the sevice plan. you don't have to pay that with fios, well you are, they are just built into the box prices. But I will say that with fios now being able to share across all tvs, and the stbs being able to set recordings, its a better setup than the dish hopper/joey since each stb still has a tuner and can watch live tv anytime.
And we were told even with a contract, unlike dish, you have 30 days to cancel with no ETF, so you don't have to do no contract and then try and get the contract savings, just do a contract from the get go if you want that and if you don't like it you can cancel within 30 days.
Apart from long waits to talk to someone which I also experienced with Dish, I have not found Fios CS horrible, its not great but no company is really great all the time. The techs are usually good, but you can get a not so great one just like with dish. We had one guy say he put an order for a new 211k and it never showed up. Called back and it never showed it, we never out it. We had a port failure on the DPP44 switch but did not lose any channels, because they had mirrored the Spanish channels on 72, we had 61.5, 72, 110 and 119. 119 no longer worked. I figured this out on my own by switching the cords around and seeing that 119 worked while on port 3 but not port 4, so it was the switch, not the lnb. The CSR told us we would be fine it did not matter if one port was bad. My brother, without telling me had really bad reception and drop outs for 6 months. I always wondered why he said he hated dish, i never had those problems, lol. Turns out they should have changed out the switch, and by that time I had gotten rid of the service plan so I had to re add it or pay $95. Frankly I was tired and did not put up a fight, but they should have fixed it for free because of the first CSR was dead wrong, I should have left right there and then. But yeah, I would not paint dish CS as great, lol.
But you really can't expect a csr to answer all those questions, if you were moving to dish you would just have as a hard a time getting that info. check out the review of the new guide to get an idea of the
dvr interface.
, so we got 3 7232 boxes, and two set top boxes. The guy was really helpful, and upgraded the router as well to the new N router, gave me an Ethernet switch for my room since he said the extra wireless router i had setup might mess up the dvr sharing, and also left me with a moca to Ethernet adapter for my brothers room for his xbox and ps3. And all the dvrs can see each other, and the STB can set recordings to any one of them. Just hope that it does not cause any problems with someone deleting something they should not. Picture quality looks a little better, but not overwhelmingly, and will miss the PIP, but can live without that.
