YoSappy - I’m not sure where you picked up that someone said there were no new boxes needed.  If I alluded to that I apologize.  You may need new equipment depending upon what you have because the system does only support the newer systems for the most part.

The re-wiring was minimal on my end.  I’m not sure I would trust what the guy on the end of the phone says over the installer.  When I had called initially the person on the other end didn’t know anything about the system.  It took him several minutes to find a source of information and he was reading it to me as he was learning about it.

The DTV installers in your area may just be sub-contractors that don’t have the right type of insurance, which of course makes no sense, but that’s going to be my guess.

This is fairly bleeding edge technology for DTV, so I wouldn’t be too hard on them yet.

I just called DirecTV and they want to charge me $150.00 to come to my home and correctly connect the necessary network hardware for this service to work properly.  So, you guys are incorrect when you say that there is no new hardware required.  I already have a perfect functioning home network with all my DirecTV HD TVRs hooked up to the network; but, DirecTV says that is not good enough because they have to re-wire some things.  When I pressed them to be EXACT in what needed to be done, of course, they leave that up to the installers.  So, somebody is full of malarky here when it should cost me nothing.  Also, I would never let DirecTV go within 100 miles of my network simply because not one of their so-called service people could install my Dish when I moved.  I had to contact a Professional Audio / Video Installation Company because DirecTV Technicians were not insured to go onto my roof.  WHAT A CROCK!  That’s why they say they offer STANDARD Professional Installation, which translated means, we punch a hole in your wall and install a Dish on your wall.  That’s it.  Anything else is considered Non-standard Professional Installation.

Kenneth,

The guys that set mine up were quite entertaining.  Basically I had a lot of the questions you had and they really only knew which end to plug into where to make it work.  Because of the complexity of my system I needed to be home to make sure it worked when they finished, so I assisted with part of the install.

I’m at work at the moment, but when I get home and have a second I’ll be glad to provide greater detail on how it works if you are interested.  I probably knew more about the way it worked than they did once I saw it.

From memory, there’s some devices that DTV calls SWIM that changes the four LNB signals off the sat dish into a single stream.  Once the lines are plugged into the main DVR it creates it’s own private network over the RG6 cable that I had running through my house.  I know there was some CAT5 cable involved, but I can’t remember the specifics on it.  I do know that the SWIM devices sit before each of the HD boxes.

I know the signal levels have to be much higher than previously, so they had to “tune” my dish a bit more as well.

Anyway - let me know if you want more info.

I interested in how that its network the tvs, and how easy it is to ad a tv, and are there issues with remotes on different tvs,?  What kind of cabling and how long of a run can it handle?

Ken Lawson

I’ve had this in my house since about the first week they announced it in my area (Denver metro) and the only minor complaint that I would have on this is when using the 30-sec skip feature it tends to lag just a bit. 

Overall though it’s great.  We use the DVR in our basement and can watch programs on the 2nd floor in our bedroom.  Not bad for when we are too tired to head to the basement and fire up the big system but wanted to catch the program from the previous day or farther back.

Brian