Chris, we, too, had a package deal of telephone service, DLS Internet service, and Dish Network from Centurytel; two receivers, one in the living room and one in the bedroom. It was all installed on 9/19/05. Six months later (3/21/06), when the one in the living room quit working, and after I checked everything I could check myself, I got them on the phone, and we went through all the diagnostic stuff again and they concluded (and correctly) that their receiver/converter box was defective. So they shipped me a new one "under warranty", but charged me $14.95 shipping and handling. Natually, it came with written instructions for the setup, but they didn't work. On the phone again with a very nice young lady and after an hour or so she figured out how to make it work (all the settings entirely different from the written instructions they sent). Just over a year later (4/7/08) the one in the bedroom quit working. That time I got a man on the phone, who, after having me check everything I'd already checked, for nearly an hour, concluded that the problem was the remote control, which was no longer under warranty, but he'd send me a new one (I don't remember how much he said it would be). Now I don't know much about TVs and electronics, but I do know enough to know, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the problem was the converter box, not the remote control. Had they simply sent someone out here to fix their equipment when it didn't work, I'd still have Dish Network, but under the circumstances, I switched to DirecTV on 4/14/08.
Is one actually any better than the other? I don't know. I've only had a problem with it one time (closed captioning quit working even though it was turned on and had been working fine), and the young lady I got on the phone, told me how to reset it and got it working again. But I think I'm paying an extra $5 a month so that they're actually supposed to come out, at no additional charge, and fix anything we can't fix with a phone call.
