The cable TV industry makes some pretty outrageous claims about being superior to the satellite TV industry, but when you compare the features and price of the average cable TV provider along side a satellite TV provider like Dish Network, those claims of superiority really don't hold up. In fact, they fail miserably. That's because the technology that the cable TV industry relies on just can't perform as well as the technology that enables Dish Network to provide better service.

The deficiencies of cable TV mostly center around an inability to offer more than about one hundred channels. Sure, there are a few cable TV companies that can offer as many as two hundred channels, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Most cable companies fall more around the ninety to one hundred channel mark. This limitation on the number of channels that the average cable TV provider can provide revolves around the matter of bandwidth. Bandwidth is the amount of data that a data transmission system can transmit over any given period of time. Since television programming is really just data when you get right down to it, bandwidth limitations apply to television the same as they do to things like Internet connections. The fact is that the cables that cable TV operators use to transmit their programming have much stricter bandwidth limitations than the electromagnetic signals that Dish Network uses to transmit its programming. That means that as the number of available channels has grown (largely in response to Dish Network's ability to deliver them to its subscribers) the average cable TV provider has been unable to add those channels to its line up.

The result of this difference in bandwidth limitations is the fact that Dish Network can provide over two hundred and seventy channels in the same programming package while the typical cable TV company can only provide a little more than a third that number. This limitation also seriously hinders cable companies' abilities to offer a variety of programming packages. While Dish Network has a bunch of different programming packages to choose from, ranging from the economical to the opulent, cable TV providers typically only have their economy packages and their normal packages. The limitations become even more apparent when you look at the fact that Dish Network offers a variety of extra- add on programing- like seasonal sports subscriptions and foreign language programming that cable TV just doesn't deal with.

High definition television is a technology that the typical cable TV company has a really hard time providing for its customers. That's because every high definition television channel takes up as much bandwidth as ten normal channels. Since more cable TV providers are already stretched to their limits with normal channels, adding high definition television channels simply isn't an option without upgrading the cable systems that deliver the programming to subscribers. Actually many cable TV providers are doing just that. That's a positive step for them in the sense that they will be better able to compete with Dish Network, but it's a very negative step because such upgrades are expensive and they're passing the cost of the upgrades on to their subscribers in the form of rates that have been rising much faster than overall inflation over the past few years. This is alienating many cable subscribers and prompting them to switch over to Dish Network.