A Totally Different Kind of Snowpocalypse
Quick, when I say "cable service in the District," what springs to mind? Odds are, you're thinking Comcast's overall ineptitude and Verizon's never-ending quest to get FiOS into D.C.'s living rooms. But while there's little doubt that said topics represent the lion's share of the headlines, Washingtonians may tend to forget that region's less monopolistic cable operators have just as many foibles. According to postings on the Cleveland Park listserv, there are a group of people who certainly didn't miss an issue with one of those smaller operators, RCN: some analog subscribers were experiencing a digital blizzard of white snow on their televisions, well before the notorious February 17 drop dead date.
One poster explains:
RCN has gone all digital. They announced it in a letter a while back that looked like their typical advertising, so you probably threw it away. I also neglected it and so have no TV service. I imagine their customer service lines will be jammed for days.
Hold on. Isn't the big, scary analog-to-digital conversion not scheduled for another few weeks? To boot, isn't there a strong consensus that most of America remains unprepared for the switch, so much so that a delay of the conversion date is currently being considered in Congress?
photo by alex.DC.
Well, RCN didn't really feel like waiting until February. The Herndon-based company rolled out an initiative called "Analog Crush" in September of last year, looking to get a jump on the whole digital conversion process. According to the press release, subscribers were informed of the big push "before their service area is converted" -- but if the information came on placards that are anything like the junk mail that cable providers usually sends out (hey, digital phone service for $59 a year!), one can't really blame some people for tossing them.
Other messages note that folks who somehow managed to not chuck their suddenly-important junk mail went through a convoluted process: ordering a new converter box from RCN, hooking it up, calling to activate the line, paying a nominal fee for more than one conversion, and learning a brand new channel lineup. One of the affected customers says that the early switch "probably pushed me into getting rid of cable." He's not alone. We Love DC's Wayan experienced the crush back in December, and said he'd switch back to Comcast. There are some positives to the early switch -- for instance, some new channels and potentially better signal quality -- but this is nothing more than the nationwide switch is offering, and certainly, nothing that couldn't wait for four more weeks.
Frankly, I've only ever used RCN to bully Comcast's retentions department into giving me a break on my rates. (Which is, admittedly, much more a commentary on Comcast's wildly inflated charges than any reflection on RCN.) Do any of you have RCN? If so, have you been negatively impacted by the early switchover to all-digital service?