Why do they suck? Let me count the ways:
- Laughable HD DVR. The Scientific Atlanta 8300HD/HDC. I have 2 of them. I hate both of them. I've gone through 5 of them trying to get 2 that work. I still get audio drop-outs on HD recordings (the live versions were fine), the user interface was teleported in from 1985, and recordings just fail to occur for no explainable reason. Tonight was the last straw. I couldn't watch Ch 557 (HGTV HD) or Ch 558 (Food Network HD), called tech support, they did something and I could watch it on the livingroom unit. Went into the bedroom later and it said "Guardian has determined your software must be updated. This may take 20 minutes or more..." Well 2 hours later and a call back to tech support confirmed I just toasted *another* SA8300HDC. Tech scheduled for Monday. I'm going to Best Buy and buying 2 HD TiVo's tomorrow to replace these SoBs! And I'll make the tech use the M-Cards from the 8300HDCs in the TiVo's. Ha!
- Inexplicable lack of certain channels. I've never been on a cable system where there were no national religious channels. I mean come on, everyone has TBN - they pay local systems for placement just like QVC! But for some reason the Greensboro market has no mainstream religious programming. No TBN, no Daystar, no EWTN, no GodTV, no nothing. I think we may get some Catholic channel a couple hours a day. I can't believe the churches around here or at least the cable customers haven't complained.
- Craptacular HD Channel Lineup. I can't believe they're actually advertising how many they have - 29! They even trumpet it in their on-hold announcements. DirecTV - which I have at one home - has 70 channels. Time Warner doesn't carry 7 of the local HD broadcasts I get on DirecTV.
- Limited internet bandwidth. I have the "Turbo" package which is supposed to yield 8mbps x 512 kbps. That's great except Time Warner doesn't overprovision... so you only get ~85% of the stated speed. I've never downloaded faster than ~7.5 mbps. Upload is never over 500 kbps. Compare that to the Embarq service I have... 6 mbps x 896 kbps. I consistently download at the actual 6 mbps and upload around 850 kbps. I miss having 1/2 my upload speed horribly when I'm on the Time Warner connection. I'd like to see them move to 10 mbps x 1 mbps.
