Cable companies always push the 'what if it rains?' angle on satellite TV. What's funny to me is that, with cable, sometimes your picture will lock up or pixelate for no good reason, whether there's cloud cover or not. The signal issues for me with DirecTV were no worse (& quite possibly better) than with cable. It's complete nonsense. I've had Dish Network for 8 of the past 9 years. For one year I lived in an apartment and had to get Comcast cable. That cut out way more often than Dish ever does, and would be down for hours at a time. Sometimes I'd just be down 2 or 3 channels, but they'd be down for almost the entire evening. With Dish, I sometimes lose it in very heavy storms, and sometimes in lighter ones - it seems hard to predict, as I've had crazy storms fail to affect the picture at all. Overall, I have fewer outages with Dish than I did with Comcast or Charter (which I had from 2000-2003). Also, it's cheaper and we can get Japanese channels that no cable company offers in our area.