BendBroadband began dropping analog channels in September to both make more room for its digital services -- an analog channel takes up the bandwidth of roughly 10 digital channels -- and motivate customers to procure set-top boxes before the year's end. It did not reduce the price for the company's analog customers.
John Farwell, BendBroadband's vice president of business operations, wrote in an e-mail to The Bulletin that the company spent more than a year announcing channels would be dropped from analog service and reduced the price of its digital plans as an additional incentive to get people to switch from analog to digital. Reducing the price for analog service would be "counterproductive," Farwell said.
"Why would I encourage people to stay on analog by reducing their price, when I am trying to motivate them to upgrade [to digital]?" Farwell wrote.
The FCC letter required the targeted companies to respond within 14 days. BendBroadband complied, and the matter is still under review, according to Robert Kenny, an FCC Enforcement Bureau spokesman.
Kenny said he was not familiar with BendBroadband's particulars, but he said the investigation is focusing on whether all 11 of the cable providers have properly notified certain customers what their options are and how they will be charged if they don't choose to use a set-top box.
Switching to digital, said Kenny, "shouldn't impact how [cable providers] treat their customers on the basic tiers, so this is more about taking channels away and not giving notice. We don't think that's fair."
BendBroadband has posted on its Web site a detailed list of frequently asked questions about its digital transition and its costs and has spent months calling analog customers and communicating, via mail and bill inserts, its switch to digital, Farwell wrote.
In addition, the company stopped offering analog service as of May 2007 and has converted roughly 99 percent of its analog customers to digital service, according to Farwell. He expects the slim number of customers who haven't upgraded to a set-top box will likely call the company after Jan. 1, at which time they will be notified how much each digital plan costs.
The company's four digital plans range in price from $17.95 to $47.95.
"The tactic has worked, so we will now have a small and manageable number of people needing assistance to convert in early January rather than perhaps having thousands," Farwell wrote.
Some BendBroadband customers can get by without a set-top box. By law, all digital televisions manufactured or shipped to the U.S. after March 2007 are required to have a built-in digital tuner, which enables the television to view digital cable without a set-top box.
However, a digital tuner can only access the unscrambled portion of the signal. For BendBroadband, that means customers with a digital television with the right post-March 2007 digital tuner (also called a QAM tuner) can view the 24 channels that make up the company's Limited Plan, which includes the four network affiliates, Telemundo, C-SPAN and The Weather Channel, and costs $17.95 a month.
A set-top box is required to view the channels included in the company's other three digital plans, as those channels are scrambled by BendBroadband.
"The reclamation of analog bandwidth ... allows us to launch more [high-definition channels], faster Internet speeds through channel bonding, advanced services, better pictures and sound, in addition to parental controls," Farwell wrote.
