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You'll have to decide from your options. If you're a sports nut who MUST have the Sunday Ticket, and are willing to pay for it ($200 or so), then DirecTV is pretty much your only option. If you want the best HD DVRs available, then Dish is your option. What do you watch the most?

Which one has the most HD will swap back and forth. Look at the channel lineups, and expected changes. That might help you decide.

I have Dish, and I'm very happy with them. But frankly, I chose them because they had a $10/month for the first year promo when I entered the market. They have pretty much all the HD and other channels I want. And I LOVE the unlimited external storage that the Dish ViP series allows. You may have other priorities.

YES, but that's just me...

Before the price increase, I would have said "heck yeah"!!!

Now it's still good enough to keep me as a customer, but I'd re-evaluate your options based on pricing you have from your local competition and DirecTV.

You may still find Dish is the best value, but it's not as easy a "yes" answer as before. One good point though, Dish typically freezes price increases for two ars after every increase. So if the competition bumps their prices up within the next year, then the answer will become "Heck Yeah" again.

Obviously, a personal call - your worth is not my worth ... But, I was in the same spot back in October. I was with my local cable company for many years. Then they had some box/HD quality/customer service/outage issues. After attempting to work all that out, I decided that it was time to look at the alternatives. The funny thing was it was those Beyonce commercials (over and over and over) that got my research started with D*. But, since I'm a comparison/numbers type, I created a "total cost of ownership" over a two year period - to factor in those great introductory offers - (and in my case) - Dish won in the cost category over my cable by about $10 per month, and a few more dollars over D*. With the Feb. price increases, it is a much closer call. However, after being a customer for 3 months now, here are some other factors that I put in the "is it worth it?" category for me - on top of a few bucks a month:
- Not one interruption of service since 12/11. I was re-booting my cable box weekly - and it was taking about 10 minutes - that (to me) is an outage.
- Better equipment - the 722 allows for DVR sharing to a second TV - less contention for the main tv so each family member could watch their recordings easier. Larger hard drive.
- HD Reliabilty - My cable co was having issues as they added HD and nothing was more annoying than putting on ESPN HD only to have a black screen. Of course, if I called, it was "did you reboot the box?". The HD channel(s) that would not come on - it varied week to week.

So, for me it was also ending the growing frustration with my cable service. That was so worth it. I do miss those dancing blips on the box as it was booting yet again (NOT!)

Saving money, better quality, and reliable ... Looking back I wonder what took me so long.

your actual mileage may vary ...

Bill