Thread: CI Slot, Smart Cards and interchangability

Hello everyone,

For all those who have a DTH connection, might have noticed that the set top boxes, provided by the service providers have disabled the CI slot, and even the smart card slot works only for that particular operator. This means once you buy the euipment from say, Dish TV, you become their customer in all aspects, even if you discard the connection since the set top box becomes useless. This issue has to be sorted out. What if one year later, I have a settop box from dish tv, but needs a Tata Sky connection. Why cant I just purchase the Tata Sky card and use it with my dish tv set top box??

Secondly, all the FTA channels are blocked once our subscribtion gets over!! This is nonsense. We owe the hardware now, but we are not getting FTA!!
Is this fair??

Has anyone got any clues regarding this?? Please help!

TRAI has been working very hard on introducing the interoperability aspect in DTH. Dish TV I heard was once incorporating CAM (conditional access module) but didn't get to hear of its market launch. Also its true FTA is not Free even in Dish tv you need to subscribe to get FTA.

I agree that STBs should be interchangeable.

But in the long run cost of hardware is not really an issue. It is still a one time cost. My own rant is that services are very expensive, especially Tata Sky.