The Front Row

It usually takes a severe electrical storm to knock out my satellite. Usually it knocks out the cable too.

Cable is the same as satellite. They just have one big dish and the hard lines from it. Direct TV just makes everyone their own cable company in a mini sense of the way and eliminates the need to lay all that line. I've experienced more outages from cable than I ever have from a dish.

Something was wrong with your equipment or setup. Perhaps you had a tree or a building blocking your signal. If that is the case then yes cable is probably going to be better for you. I've had DTV for......7 years and never experienced what you have described. Suffice to say it is probably an isolated incident.

I live in the western mountains of North Carolina; the only services available that carry the Big Ten Network are DTV and Dish. The problem I have...is the tree coverage in the mountains will not permit the service to be reliable...outages constantly!!! But, cable isn't offered, and even if it were they wouldn't carry BIG Network. So believe me, I'm aware of the frustration that comes with TV issues. I know this may not pertain, but I needed to vent. These people down here only care about basketball; nobody understands my trials and tribulations when it comes to "missing out" on a Buckeye game due to DTV outage!

What would be your costs on local cable, and what would be the options?

I think that dtv is the gold standard. I love all of the sports networks available at the price that I spend. Even with all of the wind and rain the last few days the signal was fine. Except for when my power was out.

I use tw cable and I get a 2 MB download and 768 k upload. The speed seems to be fine for everything except for modernwarfare online play. It costs me 30 bucks a month. Plus my dtv package costs me roughly 70 but I have lots of add ons and extra tv's and whole home dvr capacities. So all together I have a great package for 100 a month.

i've had direct tv since it came out. i've got hd dvr's in the cave, the living room, and the bedroom, in the last ten years i've lost the signalmaybe six times, that's not bad compaired to warner cable and their outages every other month. also i keep the cost down by not having any premium movie channels. you can download any movie free and pipe it thru your tv . this allows me to have every premium sports channel without going broke. i wouldn't go back to cable if they paid me to.

It takes a lot to effect it. But you can just clear it off and its fine. Most times the snow doesn't even stick to it. Its the wind you would need to worry more about. That dish can act like a big sail. If it isn't securely fastened, it can move enough to interrupt or degrade your signal.

My trick to counter that is to score the bar of metal on both pieces so if the wind shifts it, you don't need to get a compass out and align it. You can just line of the scores on the metal you made. Thats only a factor if you don't have it fully secured.