Dec. 8--Bend resident Earl Strei has five televisions in his home. This summer, he added a set-top box from BendBroadband to each one, worried he would no longer be able to watch cable come Jan. 1, 2009, when BendBroadband switches to all-digital.

Strei pays a monthly rental fee of $1.95 each for four of them. The fifth, which enables a high-definition signal, costs $7.95 a month. With the boxes came five more remote controls. And a bigger bill.

"I don't want to have to cope with all these gadgets," Strei said.

"Seems they are trying to generate more revenue, to be attractive to someone else."

Strei and others wonder why the set-top boxes are necessary, a matter further complicated by the nation's February 2009 switch to digital broadcasting and the related government effort to inform the public about converter boxes, a separate device that decodes digital over-the-air broadcast signals. Analog transmissions will cease as of 11:59 p.m., Feb. 17.

The matter is more than a tad bit confusing, and now red tape is flying.

Last month, the Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation targeting some of the nation's largest cable providers -- as well as BendBroadband -- to determine whether they are wrongly prompting customers to switch to digital service, then charging more or requiring customers to rent set-top boxes from the providers to view the digital content.

According to an Oct. 30 letter sent to 11 different cable providers, the FCC is concerned the providers are using the nation's Feb. 18 switch to all-digital broadcasting as the reason for pushing customers to digital.

Cable providers are not required to switch to a digital signal; only full-power broadcast stations transmitting an over-the-air signal must do so.

BendBroadband, however, is required to switch to an all-digital signal.

In January 2007, the FCC granted a waiver requested by BendBroadband that allowed the company to issue its customers a particular brand of set-top box -- the Motorola DCT-700 it rents for $1.95 -- on the condition that it switch to an all-digital signal by the end of 2008.

The government is pushing telecommunications companies to adopt digital technology, partly to redistribute the bandwidth used by analog broadcasters and partly to advance technology. Digital signals can hold more data than analog signals, thus providing more content at a higher quality.

BendBroadband was one of the first cable companies in the nation to apply for the waiver. According to the FCC, there are now 160 cable providers across the country that will switch to an all-digital signal as of Jan. 1.

In a statement sent to The Bulletin last month, BendBroadband CEO Amy Tykeson wrote, "It was the FCC's own media bureau that required BendBroadband to cease all-analog transmission by 2009 as a condition of a waiver we received that allows us to deploy more affordable set-top boxes to our customers. It appears that the FCC's left hand doesn't know what its right hand is doing, when it investigates us for doing something it required us to do."

Also per the Oct. 30 letter, the FCC is looking into whether the companies involved are charging customers the same price for their analog plans even after some of the channels have been dropped or moved to digital plans.