Cable or Satellite? Who sucks the least? Help, please.

Can someone please tell me where I can find a decent cable/satellite company?!?! Does it even exist? Seriously, when I had Time Warner I was just fine, even though there were so few HD channels. At least everything else about them seemed fine. Well, unfortunately, since I’ve moved we no longer have Time Warner as an option. So, let’s go over the lovely experiences I’ve had since said move.

DirecTV – We were so excited (me and the bf), we planned ahead well in advance and ordered our service, including the NFL Sunday Ticket. WooHoo! I could not wait to be able to watch the Vikings every Sunday! I should have known to hang up when the girl I placed the order with was completely clueless. Oh well, I just figured I’d call back later to make corrections with someone who actually had a clue. No less than 15 calls later over the course of a few weeks and we cancelled the service – we never even had it installed!! They screwed up our installation dates and couldn’t fix them. It’s now the day before our move, and 2 days before our scheduled installation. It was the absolute worst customer service I’ve ever experienced. Basically, the company has a monopoly with the NFL games so they apparently feel that they don’t need to have good customer service. People will go with their service just because they want the football. Fair enough, I’ve written them off. If that’s the type of service they offer before I’m even a customer, it’s not worth it to me. Even if that means I have to miss most of the Vikes games.

Insight cable – We called the guy at Insight who works with our apartment complex and he was ready to hook us up with the first month free, and we can get an installation in 2 days, when our original DirecTV was supposed to be. But, there was a problem. Since the bf called first and supposedly owes them money from 10+ years ago, they put a freeze on this address and I was unable to order in my own name. I don’t owe them any freakin’ money and I’m not married so why can’t I get this service? So the guy tells us to call the regular number and order service as though you never talked to me, you may be able to get it with no problems. It worked, I was able to order and get an installation 2 days later. Now when we call the other guy back he says he can’t give us the free month deal anymore, we have to go with whatever they gave us. And yet, he convinced them to give him credit since it should have been his sale. Whatever, at least we have cable and internet when we move in. We were never satisfied with the service. Maybe they were little things but they were annoying and they added up. For instance, every time you turn the cable box on it goes to this stupid channel 1 Insight channel that has a little message about what channel a game is on. We could never figure out how to get the box to turn on automatically to a specific channel or to the last channel we were on. And once the box was turned on, it took forever to be able to change the channel from that dumb channel 1. It was like the remote had to “warm up” first or something. Picture-in-Picture didn’t work. The option was on the remote but if the TV didn’t have it, they didn’t offer the service. Annoying. It worked just fine with Time Warner. The DVR would randomly not record shows that we had set to record. And then there was the low number of HD channels, and the $8/mo for 4 of them. Supposedly there were many more coming, but when? Plus the HD DVR boxes, of which we had 2, were something like $15/mo each. Ridiculous. Like I said, we just never liked their service so we decided to finally move on to something else.

AT&T U-Verse – Yes, it’s finally available in our area!! We’ve been waiting and waiting and were about to go with something else and then, Ta da!! Cool. We placed the order for 3 weeks out, but with our luck, we decided to wait on cancelling the Insight until after installation. The guy came out and started the process of installing, although he wasn’t able to get a signal and had to come out and have someone else double check. Once the 2nd guy came out and confirmed, that was it, we were too far away from the box to get the signal. So even though we technically have the service in our area, we can’t get it because the signal wasn’t strong enough to reach us. Now we’ll never really be able to tell if it’s available to us at some point. Apparently the further away from the box, the less TV’s you’ll be able to watch HD channels on simultaneously too. Okay then, good thing we didn’t disconnect our cable TV first.

Dish Network – After some debate and discussion, we went with Dish Network (the bf really wanted to go with DirecTV whom I will forever hate). First of all, someone didn’t do his homework because had we known that we could not get local channels in HD we would have never signed a 2 year contract with them. I consider that to be not my fault. For now, we can get locals in HD through the box with the rabbit ears, but that won’t last once the digital thing starts. I don’t know what we’ll do then. Second of all, our remote stopped working within an hour after the technician left. I called and chatted online with their customer service people who, mind you, were actually quite nice and attempted to be helpful. They tried and tried to get our remote to work but no dice. They had to send us a new one. Great first day experience!! The next day the remote started working again and then stopped. We got the new remote and it worked at first, then stopped. The remote will then randomly begin working again. We have experienced this every single day for the entire time we’ve had this service. There are times when we just decide to change the box to single mode and use the remote from the 2nd TV to control the box and we just watch the same thing on both TV’s. I mean, seriously, who wants to talk to customer service every day. So I finally called again today (which is what prompted me to write this). First the guy told me that it sounded like a receiver issue, so he requested a new receiver for us. In the process, he checked for known issues for this particular box. Sure enough, there is some sort of signal crossing with this receiver and some LCD TV’s. His solution is to send us a new remote that uses the UHF signal. Supposedly, it should work to have 2 UHF remotes with the same receiver. We shall see once we receive it. But, our new problem is that we just got a fancy new remote that will not work with a UHF signal. Not that I care, but the bf certainly does. If the new remote doesn’t work we are supposed to get a new receiver. I doubt that will help us at all, since this is a known issue that occurs with “some” LCD TV’s. Right. Where is this disclosure in our contract?

I’m not sure what to do. I certainly don’t want to stay with a company that has such poor performance, but what is the better of all the evils? Plus now we’re locked into this 2 year contract and I don’t want to have to pay to get out of it. I guess these are the reasons they make you sign a 2 year deal?!? Because they know they suck, just like DirecTV sucks in the customer service department. Any suggestions? Ideas? Resolutions?

Oh, and to top it off, the week after we called to cancel the Insight service, they added their “up to 60” HD channels. Figures.