DirecTV Not So Direct

I was just reading your post about DirecTV and thought I'd tell you my experience with them. We had DirecTV for a little over a year. The channel selection at the time was good but the equipment they gave us was clearly worn out. I ended up calling support four times in about three months because the screen would blank and a "You need to pay your bill" message would pop up. The bill was never in arrears so I would call Support to get the service turned back on. Finally the problem became unfixable short of a cold reset. They wouldn't replace the box and the support calls all went to India to an office where apparently no one spoke anything approaching English but, worse, on the last call, the support guy clearly was reading from a script and had no idea how to do anything else and absolutely no knowledge of the equipment. His instruction to me was "Push the red button." Unfortunately there was no red button visible. So I said, "I don't see a red button" and he replied "Push the red button." After five times through that cycle I finally asked for a supervisor and got someone in California. She told me where the mystery "red button" was. Clearly he didn't know. (It was behind a small door way down in a corner and nearly invisible.)

The point of that long rant is that if you decide to go with DirecTV be sure to check that the equipment you get is new and I'd find out where their support people are located now. My experience with them was well below satisfactory. We now have telephone, computer and TV on an optical cable, all from a local supplier, with marvelous support by knowledgeable English speaking people. There is no way I would go back to DirecTV.

As an aside there was a strange little problem that cropped up in the Winter. After a snowstorm the quality of the reception dropped dramatically. Turned out that there was snow piled up in the bottom of the dish. Fortunately it was mounted right next to the edge of the roof and I was able to brush the snow out with a broom. If it had been on the peak of the roof it would have been unreachable with a foot of snow on the roof. Obviously that wasn't a DirecTV problem but it happened more than once.

--Oldster