QOW - Cable or Satellite, Cable or DSL?
Question of the Weekend. I’m looking to do some changes here with my TV watching and high speed and need some assistance. We’re currently a Dish home, use Comcast for high-speed and Vonage (one of the first customers I’ll tell you) for phone. I want to upgrade to HD for TV and received some costs from both Comcast and Dish, but am hesitant. With DISH, I would still have to pay for high speed unless I switched to DSL.
What do Portlanders like? Are you a Comcast Bundle customer? Are you on Qwest DSL? Do you have fiber to your home for $15/month like my friend in Woodburn? Are you on satellite? Also, any bargaining tips when working with the companies to get the services? Thanks.
Comcast cable for both broadband and digital cable television. We’ve been happy with both, and have enjoyed the High-Definition television in particular. In particular, I’ve become really fond of Comcast On-Demand services. We typically watch a couple of movies per month On Demand, and some of those are free. In particular, we have watched ‘Men in Black’ and ‘Ghostbusters’ in high definition — awesome.
I’m a Comcast HD customer and frankly the quality sucks. They recompress the signal which introduces more “noise” into the picture. Satellite systems do the same thing. I get a far superior picture with over-the-air HD. What tipped me off to the problem was when I bought a HDV camcorder and the quality of the picture from the camcorder made Comcast HD look like crayon smears. Comcast HD is better than no HD but not as spectacular as they would like you to believe!
A good UHF antenna is needed by most OTA tuners. The best one I have found for my location is from Radio Shack and looks like a UFO on a stand. It’s good because it rotates,via remote, to tune in the strongest signal.
as a comcast customer, i would agree that the quality of the HD channels varies, though some of this is due to the network feed as well. for example, NBC looks relatively bad and this is due to the fact that they split their signal with a weather subchannel… and the head of nbc has said recently that he’s not that concerned with HD, unfortunately. but that will change as more people make the jump.
None of the above. Yes, I’m one of those freaks who only has like 10 TV channels, all obtained via an antenna.
I don’t have a TV feed; I’m a huge NetFlix junkie instead. So, I don’t sweat the Cable/Dish question, and because I don’t need cable for TV, I opted for DSL for my network needs.
We have Comcast for digital cable including the DVR and the broadband…it’s not a bad package - but we seem to loose our connection more often than we should - but the DVR is the killer - it has this extremely irritating habit of recording just a few minutes off of what the actual program is, but not consistently slow or fast - we’d taken to recording the show prior to what we wanted to watch because we kept missing the first 5 minutes - then this week we missed the final 5 minutes of South Park when it cut off early. It’s their schedule and their recording device - shouldn’t they be able to keep in synch?!
I work for Comcast so the answer is simple.