i have a comparison question if i may..please come by for a minute :)

[razorphreak900]

hey everybody. i have a question, i am obviously a bhn customer in the tampa bay area (saint pete to be exact) and i can say i never had zero issues with them.....and i am overall happy with the selections......BUT i was in the search of info on directv....now i have no idea what its like and i dont kno anybody with the service that i kno...thought i see the service everywhere. like people tend to like it.....now i went to the site and i wasnt going to order it but i did it as if i wanted to and i selected everything i liked even with the hd service,1 dvd box and 1 hd box..for like 12 month its like 100 dollars....from what i compared its cheaper with more channels, NOW my actual question is....how is the quality of the channels,how is the service (thought once it works good idc how they run their serivce lol),does it work well on bad weather? you guys get the idea....and of course your experiences with it....i really apreciate your time and your input....remember im from saint petersburg so if you happend to have or had it...let me kno how it did in this area.....etc etc......well thanks again in advance and for being patient...sry for my writting......take care everybody.....(oh i have already checked the directv forum, but i need to compare bhn with direc) i saw some article but they mainly compared it to like comcast....but comcast alone is very different than bhn so u guys get me....ahhhh i need to go lol....bye again

 

[iceturkee]

ah, you have come to the right person for d* info.

i shall try to make this brief. first, they downsize their hd channels so bad many people on this forum refer to it as hd-lite.

second, their customer service stinks. the right hand never knows what the left one is doing. you often have to play csr roulette to get a problem taken care. they do have a customer retention department to resolve problems. but i got into a major brohaa with them late last year, which is the reason i canceled.

i had to move next door (spur of the moment as the former tenant was evicted) because i had just received an electric wheelchair from the va and needed room to use it. the location wasn't great for the dish. and i didn't want to get locked into a lengthy contract, given that i have a progressive disease. i kept them informed.....they thanked me. and then i got the retention csr from hell, who said the other people had lied. i told them to stick it where the sun doesn't shine.

bottom line........if you like pro football (sunday ticket) and having both of your regional sports nets (fsn florida = marlins and dray games in hd), then you might like having the dish. the locals are in hd and they have espn2hd.

and yes, you are prone to lose the picture during rain storms.

 

[stevenl]

and in florida it rains every day of the summer (for the most part) So in florida D* isnt the recomended source of entertainment. BHN offers free trouble calls if you have problems no contracts so if you dont like BHN you can leave whenever you want. D* obviously has a contract (maybe cause they suck so bad and afraid you will leave?) so anyway, with BHN you can also get highspeed net and didgital phone. digital cable + HSD + digi phone, will run you about 135-145month after taxes which is a big saving over buying everything seperate from even d + local telco... and price isnt always everything you can probley find a special from dish and get it even cheaper but ya know what... you get what you pay for..



PS: I am slightily biased!

 

[iceturkee]

truthfully, until i upgraded to hd with directv and had to move next door.....i had zero problems with them. because i bundled my services with bellsouth at the time, i saved money on my wireless, satellite and internet services!!

the hd, however, was a nightmare from the day, the tech came to change my dish and receiver. and, although it does rain a lot in florida in the summer, if your dish is aligned properly, most of the time, you won't get a rain fade unless its a heavy storm.

sorry, steven, but there are advantages to owning a dish....something i would still have if it weren't for my health issues!!

 

[razorphreak900]

thanks alot guys for your input, i apreciate it , ill be around later on

 

[Khandurian]

I would NEVER support a company that sues 200 THOUSAND people for theft of service with NO REALL proof.

 

[stevenl]

iceturke i did say i was slightly biased

 

[razorphreak900]

I would NEVER support a company that sues 200 THOUSAND people for theft of service with NO REALL proof.

that dont make sense, i mean if you pay for the service then the proof is your bill...if anybody was stealing it...how would they know and if the house/family never installed a dish on the house why would they get sued? unless the workers drive around checking for houses that has a dish that aint register with the company,especially if the house according to the company never had service, thats one way of a person stealing,dish or directv,lol

 

[iceturkee]

okay, steven, i get your point!!

 

[Khandurian]

Hey razor, if your really interested in knowing the information about what they did pm me so this thread doesnt get hijacked

 

[razorphreak900]

Hey razor, if your really interested in knowing the information about what they did pm me so this thread doesnt get hijacked

lol this whole thread doesnt really make sense, i feel like i have been messed with lmao...but its ok....pm me on w/e it is that u wanna tell me. ttyl man...peace

 

[HDTVFanAtic]

1:25am this morning I realize my cable went down sometime over the last several minutes. Connect light flashing on modem indicating its not connected. TV channels out too.

I realize it could be a scheduled maintenance at that time of the morning. However, with the cold snap, something tells me no.

So I call the NOC, tell him whats up - he checks my hub and sees the packet losses all around me. Writes a ticket - and calls people out of bed go out and find out what happened.

Now granted, literally no other non-BHN employee can call the NOC, much less get this type of response. They would have to go through a clueless CSR - god knows where they are located. They would have to wait for more customers to call in reports of outages in the area and then escalate it if they felt it was over a large area, god knows how long that would take, and it would probably come on sometime after Sunrise.

By 2:30am my service is back up - and so is the service to a quite a few others who never knew there was a glitch overnight.

I would love FIOS. I would love the channel selection.

But a big part of that decision would be knowing I could not have even come close to accomplishing this with one of Verizons 2 nationwide NOCs somewhere in America in any timely manner such as I what I was able to do with BHN. I would never get past the CSR, possibly in India.

If it was Directv or Dish, they might have been able to schedule me an appointment next week to get me back up.

This decision might be tough when the time comes.

 

[Khandurian]

They would have to go through a clueless CSR - god knows where they are located.

Melbourne forwards their call center after a certain time to Orlando. That may be where they send yours after hours?

 

[stevenl]

I dont know about other systems but in oralndo if 3 customers at the same node report a problem the maintaince dept. are automaticly dispatched out (no matter time of day/night) to address the issue. Also the nodes will automaticly report problems if the powersupplies fail or if a large amount of modems do not respond.

But customer service is something cable has the d* people beat by a longshot..

Try to get a dish tech out at 2am when your dish signal doesnt respond.

 

[HDTVFanAtic]

Melbourne forwards their call center after a certain time to Orlando. That may be where they send yours after hours?

No idea....but CSRs are generally clueless anyway - and then they have to escalate to their superior before the NOC gets involved - and that's if they happen to figure out how many reports they have had at 1:30am, so I'd rather cut out the middleman.

Besides, when a ticket gets open by a CSR, a superior can close it out before it gets fixed.

When NOC fills out a ticket, people have to respond.

 

[iceturkee]

pardon my stupidity, but what is an NOC?

 

[stevenl]

NOC = Network Operations Center.. Its where nerdy people sit in front of comptuers and monitor network preformance to look for any faults. I dont know many cable companies that operate a large NOC, usally your telcos will have them to maintain their massive internet networks,


and i dont know BHN to have one either. So im not sure what this NOC you are referring to at BHN is. The outages are signaled by 3 trouble calls being put in for the same reason. THe comptuer automaticly alerts the dispatchers their is an issue. They then will check out the system and send the appropriate tech to deal with the matter.

Headend would be the "NOC" of the cable industry. and the headend techs dont normally deal with problems other then the headend itself.

 

[Khandurian]

Try to get a dish tech out at 2am when your dish signal doesnt respond.

HAHA my wife wakes me up and sends me outside to fix it at that time

 

[stevenl]

Somebody whipped?

 

[HDTVFanAtic]

NOC = Network Operations Center.. Its where nerdy people sit in front of comptuers and monitor network preformance to look for any faults. I dont know many cable companies that operate a large NOC, usally your telcos will have them to maintain their massive internet networks,


and i dont know BHN to have one either. So im not sure what this NOC you are referring to at BHN is. The outages are signaled by 3 trouble calls being put in for the same reason. THe comptuer automaticly alerts the dispatchers their is an issue. They then will check out the system and send the appropriate tech to deal with the matter.

Headend would be the "NOC" of the cable industry. and the headend techs dont normally deal with problems other then the headend itself.

The BHN NOC for Central Florida is in Brandon. If memory serves corretly, they handle the internet and phone for Central Florida, but Orlando handles their own video at their Headend - thus they do not have the full scale NOC.

And excuse my ignorance, but how can anyone that works for BHN and knows the system NOT know that they have a NOC and where it is?