I forgot to metion the two other big annoyances.

Lets just say you have a couple of movies in HD and maybe a show or two on the DVR...oh crap, you are at 50 or 60% full on the DVR. So if, say, we were gone for a weekend, and there was a lot of TV and/or movies we wanted to record. On our return, we would have to immediately have to start watching stuff, since the space is almost at capacity.

Was this a problem at standard def? Not in a long shot, however, this is an HD world and being able to record maybe 12 or 15 hours of HD content before it's full is just not acceptable...sometimes I watch a lot of TV on Saturday, since I don't have time during the week to do so.

And the final one. So not only does the DVR not have enough space, if you are recording two HD streams then just dream on if you want the DVR to respond in a timely fashion, then you can really dream on...often we'll get a bunch of things queued up, and then all at once it'll go. Flash through 5 menus and not really do what you want.

So the DVR, underpowered and not enough space. I've seen Brandon's and while there may be a slow response from time to time (a few second delay), it's not like the 20 or 30 seconds of nothing, before you fly through a bunch of menus.

Also. One thing I'm liking about DirecTV over Mediacom, is that they make a general announcement of what they are working on. Hey we're working on an on demand (of sorts) system, hey on the next software update you can do this with your DVR...Mediacom...there's not enough communication not only with myself, but with the company. I've got promotional items, where I'll call to ask about it, and the rep doesn't know what I'm talking about, and has to put me on hold to figure it out.

So I guess that's 3...

Anyways. My 3 megabit limited DSL is, on average 40% the download speed of the 8 megabit, which really means that I don't get the 8 megabits...Sitting here at work on a 45 or so megabit pipe (burstable to more), I know sites can serve me way more then 8 megabits, so...(though I can't get those rates during business hours...silly other people using my bandwidth). In my experience with DSL before, I've always thought that Qwest took way better care of their network then mediacom did....though mediacom has gotten a lot better over the years.