The Manhattan Project
Morning Roundup: Second Helpings Edition
Compromise Uncertain on Same-Sex Marriage Law
Fire at 17th and L NW Forces Evacuations
Sculpture Garden Ice-Skating Rink Remains Closed
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?
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
The date is a deadline by which stations must vacate the broadcast spectrum and move to all digital format. I don't believe there is any requirement that they wait until the actual deadline to make the switch, although most will because they have been advertising that as the date of transition. And any further delay in the deadline would simply be caving in to the industry who always drag their feet on orders such as this. Their need to more time to make the switch is a result of their lack of immediate response when the order came out, because they took the time to fight the deadline rather than prepare for it. This spectrum is direly needed by other uses, including public safety. Any further delay would inhibit progress on other important fronts.
Just to clarify the RCN move to digital (since it affected me). It has nothing to we the gov't mandated switch, since RCN cable isn't distributed over the airwaves (which would require an antenna).
Analog cable is the cable you get when you connect the coax cable directly from your wall to the TV. You get less channels at a lesser quality that way. The other way of getting cable is digital, which involves the cable box most of you know and love.
RCN getting rid of analog was a purely competitive decision. Running both analog and digital signals takes up a lot of bandwidth, since RCN has to take up twice the space to send both a analog/digital signal for a channel regardless of which they have.
By switching to purely digital, they free up tons of room for additional HD channels, which cable needs to stay competitive with directv and other satellite providers, since they don't have the bandwidth restrictions. If satellite wants to add more HD channels, they can just send up another satellite to increase capacity. Of course, was there really a demand for Lifetime Movies HD? Really?
Forgive any mistakes in terminology, since this is all me pretending i'm an expert when i'm not...
If you have RCN they have sent postcards, a letter, and had endless info messages on their channels for 2-3 months. If the change surprised you, you weren't paying attention. Why complain when you don't even bother to glance at your mail?
Two weeks ago I called RCN, they mailed the free box, I got it two days later. Took about 10 minutes to hook up (easy instructions included), one minute to call the activation number, and I use the printed guide they mailed me to figure out the new channel lineup. Even without that, there is a TV guide channel. It is NOT a convoluted process, and the picture quality is now excellent. What's the big deal?