Is it time to give it up cable nets?

[GS Warehouse]

When I moved into my new house three months ago, we signed up with DirecTV.  I'm happy with GSN and a couple other channels, but recently we've had more-than-occasional signal outages.  Mostly, we'd get local channels but no cable channels.  Other times, CNN--a channel my mom and uncle watch regularly--is the only channel lost.  We plan to fulfill our one-year obligation, but Mom's ticked, and she's not thrilled with the local cable company--to whom my sister across town subscribes--either.  In fact, she's at to the point where she's ready to just put up an antenna next winter when our DirecTV deal expires and live on--gasp--just six channels from then on.  Given the direction TV's been heading these last few years, I think I may best off giving up cable channels cold turkey.  Sure, I would be giving up GSN, but I'd still have WoF, J!, TPiR and Millionaire.

A lot could change in nine months, but is life with 6 channels better than life with 150?

[trainman]

[quote name=\'GS Warehouse\' date=\'Mar 10 2005, 07:42 PM\']When I moved into my new house three months ago, we signed up with DirecTV.  I'm happy with GSN and a couple other channels, but recently we've had more-than-occasional signal outages.  Mostly, we'd get local channels but no cable channels.  Other times, CNN--a channel my mom and uncle watch regularly--is the only channel lost.  We plan to fulfill our one-year obligation, but Mom's ticked, and she's not thrilled with the local cable company--to whom my sister across town subscribes--either.

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Sounds like the aim of your dish may need to be tweaked a little, especially if you're frequently losing everything but the local channels:  because they're transmitted using "spot beams" that only cover a small area of the country, local channels have the greatest signal strength.  Therefore, when something is causing signal strength to drop across the board, all the other channels will drop below the threshold that causes them to go out entirely, but the local channels will still be coming in.

[Shredder]

Also, you may have to wait a year or two for this depending on where you live, but Verizon is lining up a Fiber Optic CAble Network, supposedly with 100+ channels, digital entertainment, and video on demand.  

If the price is better than cable, I'm switching over to it as soon as it gets here..

[GS Warehouse]

[quote name=\'Shredder\' date=\'Mar 12 2005, 01:44 PM\']... Verizon is lining up a Fiber Optic CAble Network ...

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Fiberoptic cable TV.  There's an idea whose time has come.  Verizon is already my ISP, so I'll be looking forward to that.