I can't comment on the HDTV issue but I've had DirecTV for several years and am very happy with them. Count me a very satisfied customer.
You can lose signal in certain weather conditions. Generally this is a thunderstorm situation directly south of our house. Any other direction and the signal is fine. Over the course of a year, the outage is less than I suffered with cable. Our local cable company is Charter Communications. They don't have a particularly good reputation for customer service however.
As for internet, I've got a solid 2.5Mbps down/512Kbps up from my DSL. (They have several packages available.) When I had cable at my other house, I did notice that DL speed would vary. Cable connections tend to be a shared resource at the neighborhood level so speed varies with what your neighbors are up to. With DSL, the "sharing" doesn't start until the CO so it tends to be more stable, IMO.
However, my suggestion is you ask users of each service in your local community what their experience has been. Your cable company may be a classier act than ours.
You can lose signal in certain weather conditions. Generally this is a thunderstorm situation directly south of our house. Any other direction and the signal is fine. Over the course of a year, the outage is less than I suffered with cable. Our local cable company is Charter Communications. They don't have a particularly good reputation for customer service however.
As for internet, I've got a solid 2.5Mbps down/512Kbps up from my DSL. (They have several packages available.) When I had cable at my other house, I did notice that DL speed would vary. Cable connections tend to be a shared resource at the neighborhood level so speed varies with what your neighbors are up to. With DSL, the "sharing" doesn't start until the CO so it tends to be more stable, IMO.
However, my suggestion is you ask users of each service in your local community what their experience has been. Your cable company may be a classier act than ours.