I am confused about installation of the Gateway when purchased from a 3rd party retailer. I purchased a Gateway and Portal from Best Buy. When I called Shaw regarding installation, the rep told me that I had to arrange for Best Buy to do the installation. Is this correct?

^ The rep is confused, not you. Try calling again and hopefully you'll get another rep who's a little more clued in.

Okay here's my experience so far - I stopped by Visions tonight and picked up a standalone gateway (not portal) for $205. When I got home I called Shaw's Gateway sales number and told them I had the gateway and wanted to swap out my two Motorola HD PVRs (6416III) for two portals. After putting me on hold for a few minutes to verify this could be done, they said yes I could swap the PVRs but that I'd have to do it at a Shaw outlet in person. So I went ahead and booked the install date (next Wednesday) and on Tuesday I plan on going to Shaw and swapping out my old PVRs for two portals.

So there you go. I actually called twice so I heard this from two different people. The first agent I talked to told me to take my old PVRs to Shaw's office and do the swap and book the appointment at that time, but after hanging up it dawned on me that it would leave me without TV until the service appointment. So I called back and talked to another agent who confirmed that I could do the swap (at the local Shaw office) but they'd book the appointment for me over the phone. So I booked.

There ya go!
Just thought I'd follow up on my first post now that I've just had everything installed. I called Shaw yesterday to request that the installer bring the portals to do the swap, so that I wouldn't have to go to Shaw's office and swap them myself. They said "no problem" and updated the service order (this is in contrast to the first two CSRs I talked to last week when placing the order who insisted on me doing the swap at the office).

This morning the Shaw tech came over. He was a very friendly guy who seemed to know his stuff. At first he was going to install the gateway in the living room next to the portal, but I requested that it be installed in the garage next to the Shaw phone modem (and out of the way) and he was fine with that even though it required pulling a new line into the house. Instead of using the gateway that I had bought from Visions, he just used the one he brought with him since it already had updated software - he then just took the one I had bought at retail back with him.

So he set up the gateway and two portals, did the swap for the old Motorola DVRs, and everything seems to be working fine. The whole thing took less than 2 hours.