Used Uverse for 3 weeks...thinking of trying Dish

Picture quality is a very subjective thing. I haven't had U-Verse TV or DirecTV so I can't compare. This forum has posts from people who have had Dish and one of the other services... some people think Dish is better or the same, others think DirecTV is better. DirecTV might be better, but I haven't seen any major complaints about the Dish HD picture quality that is specific to Dish.

People talk about "rain fade"... but I never see that with my setup. I see "black cloud fade" when dark clouds are directly in the path... and DirecTV would have that problem too. Most cases of "rain fade" are due to people who just don't have their satellite dish properly aligned/peaked for the best signal.

All receivers from all companies have bugs from time to time. I don't see overwhelming bug reports from customers of any service really. Sure, there are problems... some major ones from time to time... but either most customers are fine or they aren't complaining about it in a way that stands out.

The Hopper has 3 SAT tuners, and can have an optional OTA USB-addon for 1 OTA tuner. The Super Joey has 2 SAT tuners. Your "big four" ABC/CBS/FOX/NBC LiLs can be viewed at any time of day (24/7) on a single tuner... so IF you partake of that a lot... you have capability to watch/record those 4 channels on 1 tuner, and still have 4 more SAT tuners to use as you please.

Sling within your home uses your home network... so whether WiFi or wired shouldn't matter. When you are outside your home and Slinging to the content of your DVR, you will be more dependent on your home UPload speed than the download speed of wherever you are using WiFi. So you might be on a 10 Mbps WiFi download but if your home internet connection only allows 2Mbps upload then that's the maximum you will get on your Sling connection outside the home.

 

You're welcome.

I can't believe you never had cloud fade, though. A dark black storm cloud between you and the satellite in orbit plays havoc not only with reception but also on the uplink end every once in a while. The better your setup the rarer it is... but unless you only had DirecTV for a year, I can't believe you didn't experience some loss of signal at some time. If your setup is good, though, storms usually move through fast and you aren't down for long. Also, you might not be down on all SAT locations. I have been able to watch some channels but not others, for example.

Sling outside your home has to work off your upload speed... otherwise how does it get outside your home? Many ISPs have the upload way lower than download speeds because for most things you are sending quick requests for data and then downloading... but this is reversed when you are out of your home and want to access your Sling inside the home.

I wouldn't expect HD quality from 1-1.5Mbps upload, but depending on what kind of device you are watching from it might be passable SD quality... You want at least 3Mbps, but 5Mbps would probably be optimal. Of course the download speed wherever you are connected to WiFi needs to then be able to keep up with that... but usually the bottleneck is going to be the connection from your home.

 

Correct. The original Hopper does not support the transfer of content to a mobile device even with the Sling adapter added. You must have the Hopper w/ Sling to do it.