Has DirecTV issued any kind of public statement saying the phone lines were the reason or is that just rumor?
With all the other crap BCK was pulling, phone line installations seem to be a bit trivial.
well this is what directv issued to a tampa newspaper. even so i still would not believe this. our operations manager from pittsburgh was a cool girl and i know for a fact she told us everything they told her in her conference call with corporate. and from what she said phone lines were the big issue, not chargebacks. of course a company who's attempting to strongarm retailers out of business would say its chargebacks to make them look like the goodguys for leaving a bunch of people without work.
http://tampabay.bizjournals.com/tampabay/stories/2007/01/08/daily13.html
a short summation of that article was chargebacks. i never got one single chargeback the entire time i installed for them. to me this is a total crock, but then agan the phone line connectivity is a total crock also but it is also very real. chargebacks also existed and i wont sya they didnt. a couple guys i know in our office got chargebacks for things that where always questionable. most common seemed to be
1.) bad fitting at IRD
2.) peak dish
3. customer education
so i guess when a customers 3 year old kid rips the wire out of the back of the reciever or an hsp tech can get a s/n of 12.0 instead of 11.9 or the 70 year old customer forgets how to use thier remote it makes us all bad installers....
oh btw, if you think the big issue over phone lines doesnt exist read this.
http://satelliteworld.com/cablesux/docs/phonelines.pdf
look what it all boils down to is directv wants all of thier operations to move in house and thier installs to thier puppet companies. in other words, they want all installs to be hsp/msp. a buddy of mine who sub'd for another company told me that when that companies contract came up for renewel directv told them they would only renew the contract if they agreed to have ironwood do the installs here locally. they really sweetened the deal for it to happen too, 175 paid to this retailer for the sale and not having to deal with the installation.
again i am really not trying to stick up for bck because they did run thier company pretty bad. alot of thier salesman were a joke at best. and some of thier local offices may have had some corrupt managers or bad installers but as a whole it was as normal of operations as any other large company. when i did electrical work i worked for a couple large companies and in every one there were a handfull of hacks. its inevitable that when you have so many people working for you that it will happen.