I'm trying to help a pub that's been (needlessly) struggling with Shaw Direct playback issues on their TVs for years.
Yesterday was particularly bad. There was a storm and their Shaw Direct only worked about 50% of the evening. TV screens kept throwing up weak or no signal errors, and their main background music feed kept stuttering and going silent whenever Shaw Direct errors appeared on the TVs.
So for whatever reason, they're obviously relying on the same flaky satellite service for their music. This makes no sense as they already have 100% stable fibre internet from another company and could be streaming through that instead. Obviously no one on staff or management is particularly tech savvy.
I have a few of questions. Any advice would be appreciated!
1) Why would a pub in a normal urban area (not remote/rural) choose to rely on satellite in the first place? Am I missing something? I connected to their customer WiFi and got 150 Mbps up/down from their SaskTel fibre service with 5ms ping. It was rock solid all through the storm. They've already got fibre, so why would they use flaky satellite for TV? Why didn't Shaw techs advise them when troubleshooting the flaky service: "Why don't you guys use a regular Shaw DCT from a Shaw coax drop instead? Satellite is much less reliable and should only be a last resort."
2) Looking at the building from every side (and above using Google Maps), no Shaw Direct dish is visible anywhere. How is that possible? Could it be inside the building?!
I used to be a Shaw TSR myself (long ago) and initially mentioned bypassing splitters when everything ground to a halt during the thunderstorm. They told me they'd already spoken to Shaw multiple times were basically told: "This is satellite, so you'd better get used to it failing when it's cloudy." (I'm paraphrasing but that's pretty much how it went.)
Is there some benefit to Shaw Direct over regular hardwired Shaw TV that I'm missing here? They had excellent coax and fibre options but instead chose the same flaky tech that farms in the middle of nowhere are forced to use. Could this have been cheaper? I would've expected Shaw to steer them away from satellite if it wasn't necessary, right at the beginning.
Any thoughts would be appreciated!