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  Cable television has been around for over a decade. Despite its history, many users are switching over to satellite providers. The reason for such decisions can be attributed to the disadvantages of cable television. From costs to quality, you need to be aware of these factors when searching for television providers.
  
  

High Costs

• According to a Anne Kandra, a contributing editor for PC World, cable television is more expensive than other providers such as satellite television. She writes, "One of the most common gripes of cable TV customers is that their bills keep heading skyward with no cap in sight." This is especially true when you wish to purchase packages that include premium channels. Additional costs may also include expensive services. For example, a break in a cable wire, or a damaged cable box may take weeks to have a paid professional come to repair.
  
  

Availability

• The availability of cable television is a major disadvantage not only for consumers, but providers also. Only those homes within the providers' available infrastructure get cable television. Therefore, if your home is outside of a providers available infrastructure you cannot get, nor can providers supply cable television.
  
  Additional availability disadvantages include the fact that cable television offers less live programming than satellite. For example, satellite television shows live events from both the east and west coasts where as cable cannot.
  
  

Quality

• The biggest, most important disadvantage of cable television is quality. After all, you must factor in quality when analyzing cost and availability. According to MSNBC.com, several cable television customers have experienced poor quality when viewing their supposedly high-definition programming. Increased signal compression is thought to be the issue.
  
  With such a great demand for high definition channels at one time, cable television providers are reaching capacity, and struggling to maintain supply. In an effort to keep up, high definition channels are being compressed into the bandwidth of one analog station. To most cable viewers' frustration, information is almost always lost when signals are compressed and then uncompressed, resulting in poor high-definition quality.