The thing that really gets me is, it would be really easy to fix this. A five second buffer would eliminate the vast majority of "hiccups" in signal. I'm sure this is what XM must have if it has better performance with fewer satellites.

 

Yes and no. I was an early adopter of IPTV back in 1997. They tried to deal with network contention trough buffering. The effect though was that when you changed channels you had a 3 second delay while the buffer filled up. Not a big deal if you are oging to a specific channel but for the couch potatos that surf channels, quite annoying. They ended up getting rid of the long buffer for a barely noticeable one.

I thought about this with Sirius. You already get a 1/2 second delay then a fade-in. I'm guessing there's already a 1/4 second buffer in there (1/4 second to actually tune the channel). Me? I'd be ok making that a longer buffer in order to stop the annoying "LINKING..."

 

I like my Sirius radio. Maybe I'm the only one, but it's worth the money. I like all types of music, sometimes I want to hear the news, other times comedy, hip hop or old new wave. Doesn't matter what I'm interested in because it's all there. Also, I have all of the traffic for LA at the touch of my fingers. I went with basic radio for the month and a half that my car was in the shop and almost went crazy.

BTW, I've had both XM and Sirrius and by far Sirrius is best.

Cheers!