Customer Deflation Mismanagement

I've been a customer of DishTV since 1997 or '98. Not sure which. We signed up when we lived in Emerald Hills, between Woodside and Redwood City in the Bay Area. Back then Dish had one satellite to pick up, but the number of channels it received far exceeded what we could get with cable, or with terrestrial TV. Their system also figured we got no terrestrial TV reception (in fact it was excellent), so they made local terrestrial signals available from our choice of city. My wife is from Los Angeles, so we picked that one. Worked fine.

In that first location I ordered everything online and hooked it all up myself. Everything worked. What's more, I was impressed by DishTV's service, which as easy to reach, informative and always helpful.

Those were the good old days, now gone.

Our next house was in Montecito, next to Santa Barbara, about 75 miles from Los Angeles. DishTV kindly sent out a guy to install a new dish on the roof, at no charge. The only problem was local TV. We got no stations where we lived (in a deep hole, deeply shadowed from every TV station's transmitter). Even with a giant roof antenna (that I bought and used for a few hours before my wife told me to take it down because it was so big and ugly), we barely got anything better than a very snowy picture, even on the biggest local station, KEYT on Channel 3. But when I asked Dish about getting local channels over satellite, they told us we wouldn't be allowed get them, because their software told them we had great TV reception from both L.A. and Santa Barbara. I told them their software was flawed and wrong. They said I could appeal if they wanted to, but it was a three-month process involving a lot of paperwork and "studies" or something. So I said the hell with it. And it didn't matter, because for some reason we got the same L.A. channels we'd had before, anyway.

The next stop was our first house in Santa Barbara, a rental next to a house we were renovating. This time Dish offered Dish500, which looked at two satellites at once. They also offered a new receiver with a TiVo-like DVR or PVR. (They used the two initialisms interchangably.) Everything worked fine. What's more, every time we called with some small problem, cheerful human beings thanked us for being long-time subscribers.

When we moved to the renovated house, the guy put the dish in the wrong place, but otherwise everything was fine. We used the same receiver, and there were no problems. Again, they thanked us for being loyal subscribers.

Meanwhile, we were building our first new home from scratch, also in Santa Barbara. Since Dish was doing HDTV now, and I figured we'd want an HD setup with a flat panel, I wanted to make sure that we had the right infrastructure in place for every possible contingency. So I called Dish to make sure we'd be looking at the same satellites as before — at 110 and 119 degrees west. They said yes. Also that any new services they would add would be coming down the same part of the sky.

Since we were moving to temporary quarters for several months, I also arranged to suspend my account. For this I would pay a nominal fee of $5 per month or something. So we did that deal, and we built the new house with a short pole in the ground on the east side of the house and a clear view of satellites 110 and 119.

When it came time to move in, I called Dish up to activate the account. They had no record of me. Not by any phone number. Not by my name. Not by any address. I had been wiped off the slate completely. So there was no jive thanking me for being a customer for eight or nine years. I was a new cusotmer.

Which was okay, I guessed. Everything I needed to order would be new anyway. So I ordered a new HDTV Gold account, which has 27 HD channels. I also ordered a receiver with a DVR/PVR and an RF remote, so the receiver could work in a cabinet, out-of-sight from the remote. This is what we had with our last setup, and it worked well for us.

Then this morning the Dish installers showed up. Besides banging a ding in a wall by hauling a huge TV down some stairs they didn't need to take (they could have gone outside and come in at ground level for that floor), they took forever trying to figure how to get all three satellites: 110, 119 and 129. They got the first two, but not the third. Turns out that location — 25000 miles straight up from a point on the equator a few hundred miles northeast of the Marquesas Islands — is out of sight from the location we chose. In fact we're about 119 degrees west ourselves, so if the dish can see south it will get satellite 119. But ten more degrees to the west and the dish is shadowed by the east side of the house.

We chose this spot as the only one where nobody would have to see the dish. On these matters the deal with my wife is that no antennas or wires are visible. Up until now we've succeeded with that. After talking with our building contractor (the house is still not finished, even though we're living in it), the landscape guy and other interested parties, we failed to come up with a suitable new location. So we put the dish in the intended location and decided to live without HDTV until we can figure something out. We don't have an HD screen yet anyway. Holding off on that to let the prices continue dropping.

So, while the installers were still there, I began to play with the new receiver. Amazingly, there were a number of HD channels. What was that about? I asked. The installers shrugged their shoulders. They were good and patient guys, but their English was minimal and they prefered not to communicate beyond the basics anyway.

Then I asked about the RF remote. How did this one work if the receiver didn't have an antenna for it, like the last one did? They didn't know. Far as they could tell, it didn't have an RF feature. If I wanted an RF remote system, I'd have to call Dish.

So I sent them on their way and called Dish. After fifteen minutes or so of dealing with automated call center BS, I got a human being. After another half hour or so, I had ordered am "RF pyramid" to bridge a new RF remote with the IR-only receiver. Then, with the guy on the phone, I tried to make the DVR work. Nothing seemed to happen. Turns out this wasn't a DVR receiver. So we took another half hour to order the DVR receiver, which will be installed on the 14th. When I asked him a technical question about their installers, he said "all our installers are professionals". But when I asked him about how to return the current (non-RF, non-DVR) receiver, he told me to be sure to send it back in the RMA (returned merchandise) box he'd be sending out, and not to give it in exchange to the installers. Why? Well, he said, sometimes these guys don't send it back to us. In other words, they steal it. "Professionals, huh?" I said. The irony was not lost on the guy.

So here we are, with the wrong receiver for another couple weeks and still in the hunt for a dish site that's only visible from 110, 119 and 129 degrees west, over the equator. Looks like there might be on one on the side of the chimney. We'll see.

Meanwhile, what's the deal with the satellite at 129 degrees west? Well, Wikipedia currenly says this:

In spite of all this capacity EchoStar still needed to fulfill the dream of nationwide high-definition television and conceived the DISH 1000 system to receive signals from 110°W, 119°W and 129°W orbital locations. Originally, DISH Network high-definition subscribers required two separate satellite dishes. Today, approximately 70% of DISH Network subscribers can receive nationwide HDTV channels using the 129°W orbital location, but since the 129°W does not effectively cover the entire United States this solution is not available for large populations of customers in the Northeastern, mid-Atlantic, and deep Southern regions of the United Sates. Unfortunately, some DISH 1000 subscribers still need a second satellite dish to receive high-definition local channels. Furthermore, technical problems with the partially failed satellites used at 129°W have left the reception of high-definition content with the DISH 1000 an unfulfilled promise for many DISH Network customers.

Partially failed? Oh my.

I know, I know. Dish, DirecTV and cable are all proprietary silos run by doomed companies. But we have to do our deals with the devils in the meantime.

It'll be interesting to see what we can get with the high-gain Winegard UHF antenna I bought for terrestrial HD reception. We can't see the transmitters of any stations from here, but there's a clear path over water from here to San Diego. Two houses ago, in the rental, my wife let me put that same big ugly antenna on the roof, and we got very good reception from San Diego. (Not so good from Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.) So we'll take our chances with that. If it works, that might be fine.

I bring all this up because I want to imagine out the DIY-IT successor to the silo'd systems we're still suffering with here. As always, I can imagine lots of reasons to build out VRM (vendor relationship mangement) systems where customers can keep their own records of their ends of relationships with companies of all kinds. That way we can come to the likes of Dish and DirecTV and anybody else with our own data intact, and in some cases much more richly furnished than providers' own CRM (customer relationship management) systems allow.

Until then, we'll have more of the same.