It would be fun to run a survey and see how many of the people on this discussion forum are happy with their Tablo. This wouldn’t be a scientific sampling, as this forum probably attracts a lot of people having issues with their Tablo, plus a fair number of true enthusiasts.
As for me, I purchased the Tablo in February of 2015. Initially I was thrilled with the product, only to suffer through the Roku disaster. I ended up buying three Nexus Players to augment my three Roku 3’s just so my Tablo would be functional again (after getting tired of waiting for the eventual Roku fix). Since the Roku fix became available, I am back to being thrilled with my Tablo again. I haven’t reset my Tablo in months (and months), my wife is thrilled with the Tablo now, she describes it as an “appliance” that is just as dependable as the refrigerator. High praise from someone wanted to junk the Tablo in the midst of the Roku fiasco.
So on this forum, there are a lot of people having trouble with their Tablo setup. But, I think there is a silent majority who are thrilled with their Tablo and have no reason to post on this discussion forum. For those having problems, I feel your pain. I lurk around this forum and offer some helpful thoughts if I can.
All I can say is that a Tablo installation has a lot of connected parts in most cases (cable modem, router, wireless, switches, Tablo, external hard drive, antenna, remote clients). There is a lot of places for something to go wrong and it can be a bugger trying to identify the culprit. I personally messed around with my antenna, pre-amp, dist-amp setup for a couple weeks before I found a setup and antenna location that worked really well at my house. My biggest issue had nothing to do with the Tablo, but it would have been too easy just to blame the Tablo without any justification for this position.
My best advice, based on 18 months of reading this forum, is to first make sure your antenna setup is rock solid. Don’t split your incoming antenna away from your Tablo until you are absolutely sure your antenna setup is working while just driving your Tablo. If you then want to split the antenna signal directly to your TV’s, consider purchasing a dist amp sooner rather than later. I split my incoming antenna signal six ways through a dist amp and I have no reception issues whatsoever.
Next, take the wireless component out of the equation, even if have to temporarily run ethernet wires up and down your hallways for testing purposes. So many problems are blamed on the Tablo, when they are eventually traced back to poor wireless signal. In my house, wireless N is pretty solid, but I am lucky to get wireless AC to make it forty feet through a couple walls. I bit the bullet and ran wired ethernet everywhere in my house. It was painful to accomplish, but nothing beats the dependability of wired ethernet. I understand that Tablo advertises its wireless capabilities, but, why wouldn’t you use wired ethernet if you could? It is just one less place for things to go wrong.
Finally, if you have gone the route of wired ethernet (and you should if possible), buy an appropriately sized switch and hook up everything to the switch. Run a single ethernet wire from your wireless router to the switch and hook up every other wired ethernet connection to the switch. Basically, all my wireless router does is provide internet connectivity and wireless connections for my phones and tablets. All other network traffic travels only across a 16 port switch, relieving a majority of network traffic from the wireless router. I am not smart enough to explain why this works so well, but, I know that my network became rock solid once I adopted this connection method. I imagine that the explanation has a lot to do with the various wired ethernet devices communicating directly across the switch. I also assigned static IP addresses (actually DHCP reservations) to all ethernet devices so that I never have to wonder if an IP address has changed. You shouldn’t have to do this, but I did, and my network is very solid.
I think you can solve a lot of problems by just ensuring that your antenna setup is rock solid and by using wired ethernet, appropriately configured, whenever possible. Hopefully someone who is having problems can use some of this information to fix their issues. I did a lot of “trial and error” testing when I got the Tablo and over time I came to understand that this setup has provided me with an incredibly solid network and OTA DVR solution.