Which is better - cable or satellite?

PK - the king

As the title says, which is better - digital cable or digital satellite?

eoinm1

Hi

I would say Digi Sat.

1 You can get free channels once you buy the decoder and dish inc BBC 1 and 2.
2 Better quality of picture no pixilation (If NTL digital in Waterford is any thing to go by).
3 100's of free radio stations inc. all the BBC radio and RTE radio.


But thats just me.

Eóin

rde

I'd go for satellite, solely because of my experiences with NTL (back when I had fifteen channels). When the reception went, I'd phone up, and listen to a long list of areas that were having problems. If I wasn't among them, I'd wait on hold for ages to be told 'we're looking into it', then I'd wait patiently for reception to come back.

Sky may be an evil corporation, but they're an efficient one. In the year or so since I got the dish, I've had relatively few problems, and only one (today, actually) that caused serious annoyance.

If someone other than NTL does digital cable, I'd consider them (would have, anyway; I'm sticking with what I have for now). But there's no way on Earth I'm ever using NTL again.

Wiggy

Satellite - hands down.

Bad and all as Sky Customer Support is, it's light years ahead of NTL.
NTL Digital is extremely prone to annoying glitches in the picture.
Also, even though the Digibox software has become more unstable in the last few months, it is still far more reliable than NTL Digital.

watty

Cable you have no choice of provider or may not get it all.

Cable has no free option

Satellite need not even involve Sky at all (i.e. Hispasat, Astra19)

Satellite has many good free TV & Radio channels.

Choice even of non-Sky providers (though can be awkward).

Though some City dwellers not allowed Satellite.

Capt'n Midnight

Cable operators have exclusive rights to certain areas so you can't choose who to go with. I know of someone who was given a date of three years into the future - but because there was a rollout date they could not go to a nearer cable provider.

Some Cable operators offer Broadband via cable.
Do any of the cable operators offer telephony by cable yet ?

Of course you can have both satellite and cable.

Depends on what services you want, whether they are essential or not and how much you want to pay for them. eg: if you can save €25 on line rental and €39.99 on DSL then cable starts to look better

eg: channel 4 is not easy to get on satellite - look at the FTV threads - some SKY subscription channels are Free to air on other satellites,
For foreign language neither SKY nor Cable come close to Free to air satellite..


If all you want is Irish channels/BBC/News then an aerial and secondhand sky box is the way to go.

celticfc

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
Do any of the cable operators offer telephony by cable yet ?

Yes, ntl offer a telephony service in parts of Tallaght & also Lucan IIRC. I have 2 lines with them. However, I'm not sure if they offer this to new customers now as they've taken all information about it off their website except for support info on it.

watty

Though cable DSL has a MUCH worse contention ratio than Esat/Eircom broadband on phone wire (like difference btween on a LAN in school with 500 other PCs and *SAME* LAN hardware at home with 3 or 4 users).

But in practice even an error free 50K is fine for one to 4 users if you arn't doing mad downloads.

If you fetch email once a day and browse occasional at home then ordinary dialup can be much cheaper even than Cable DSL.

Sin e an Fear

Someone once described the difference between satellite and cable as the difference between having a railpass/buspass/travelcard and having a car. You can go and see a lot with the travelcard, but you can go and see anything with a car.

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight

Do any of the cable operators offer telephony by cable yet ?

With a broadband connection, you'll be able to get a UK broadband phone with a geographic number, that will work over ADSL or cable anywhere in the world. Hopefully the NI code will be available, so that if anyone calls you from within the Republic it will be a domestic call- and if you phone Sky, your CLI will be a UK number. I know someone in the UK using US services like Vonage on their broadband connections- I've called him on his New York number and it sounds fine. Vonage are hopefully going to be in the UK by the summer.

This is where broadband via satellite loses out big time to cable and ADSL because of the latency problem- you end up having to say 'over' at the end of each sentence because there's so much delay.

watty

Phone company Broadband is better than Cable Broadband and more available.

But:
Patrickswell.....
Cable Broadband probabily never
Eircom Broadband trigger level 362, 0 registered.

Satellite "Broadband" is only any use for "broadcast" like Casablanca, which is free and works well.

B8ut the Original question I presumed was considering TV/Radio on the two Digital media.

(BTW LurkingIcon turned into a "Freak", so won't be back!)

Sin e an Fear

Talking about Cable DSL broadband is like talking about satellite cable TV. Cable is cable, ADSL is ADSL (if you're in Europe- in the US, it's generally called DSL).

Capt'n Midnight

Originally posted by Sin e an Fear
Talking about Cable DSL broadband is like talking about satellite cable TV. Cable is cable, ADSL is ADSL (if you're in Europe- in the US, it's generally called DSL).

Technically you have a point ,
BUT it comes down to cost.
Satellite Cable TV is when you pay someone like NTL extra for something that you can get direct of the satellite.
Here ADSL is when you pay Eircom €25 per month for the prilivage of having the possibility of having ADSL , where as the cable companies charge a lot less for their cable and stick about 14 channels.


Oh yeah that is the other big reason for going cable - if you have several people who different programs at the same time then analog cable scores high if most of the time people are watching things like ITN/C4/Discovery/Sky1