As if there isn’t enough about the February 2009 conversion to digital TV to confuse consumers, now comes a warning from the national office of the Better Business Bureau that an Ohio electronics firm is touting a "free" DTV converter that actually will cost a consumer more than $100.

The BBB said the firm, Universal TechTronics of Canton, Ohio, has placed ads for a converter in publications across the country that represent a "bait and switch" scheme on behalf of the firm.

The ads are for the Miracle ClearView TV converter. The ad copy promises the hardware will free consumers of bills from video providers, for it "receives free channels …in digital video and sound." Other copy states the boxes can provide the public with free TV without the use of those $40 coupons issued by the government to fin...Read More

Krista Cooney of western Pennsylvania may have gotten a little satisfaction writing her payment check to "Comcast Vampires" in the amount of "my right arm and zero dollars," but she stopped laughing months ago.

That’s when a stranger two time zones away called her to warn that the check, with all her personal identification visible, had been scanned into an e-mail, along with her Comcast bill, and was being distributed across the Internet.

The story is chilling to anyone who worries about having their identity co-opted. If it weren’t for a compassionate stranger in Colorado, who had been an ID theft victim, too, Cooney and her husband Chad might have never learned about the response to her joke until their finances were in ruins.

Now, the tale is burning up the Internet, and Comcast once again is taki...Read More

Paul Redzimski’s condo neighbors hate him right now, and it’s all because he wanted better Internet connectivity.

Instead, he’s had periodic outages of his new service from Comcast, a plague he has visited on his RCN neighbors, too. And it’s not his fault but the fall-out of dealing with two big corporations that apparently refuse to talk to one another.

Redzimski e-mailed me, describing himself "at wit’s end." In mid-April, he decided to drop RCN digital-subscriber line service in favor of faster cable modem service from Comcast. The video-Internet package was installed April 18. But four days later, his cable went out, then his Internet followed. He did get, he noticed, an RCN sign-in screen. He called Comcast for help, and a repair call was scheduled on April 26.

In the interim, he talk...Read More

Double billing. Service phone numbers that don’t work. Long hold times. Those are just a few of the complaints that have some Indiana residents ruing the day that Comcast Corp. took over operations of the former Insight Communications Inc. systems there beginning in the first quarter.
Once more, a system ownership transition has proved more complicated than an operator hoped. Once more, an operator has exacerbated the problem by launching a rate hike just as consumers are trying to adjust to new services and billing schedules.
The Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, which has been assigned authority for consumer complaints now that franchising is a state issue, confirmed a stiff spike in complaints at the same time Comcast took over and issued the rate hikes, which was the second week of March. Beth Roads, assistant general counsel for...Read More

How much would you pay for a lifetime Internet connection? Charter Communications is about to find out; so far, one of its consumers has bid $38,579. (3 p.m. PT) for everlasting 16 MBPS connectivity, plus the promise of upgrades for life.

It’s part of an interesting marketing campaign Charter’s been quietly waging at its website. The operator will present one winner of the online auction with a document entitling that consumer to up to five computer and/or wireless connections in their home for the winner’s life. Consumers must register to bid in the auction and have a chunk of change in the bank or a credit card with a big limit. The winner will be notified on April 4 if he or she has won the auction, and he or she will have only 48 hours from that point to pay their new "cable bill."

Auctio...Read More

Since Texas first voted in 2005 to move franchising from the hands of those closest to the subscribers, local elected officials, to the hands of those chronically overburdened, state officials, potential competitors have successfully touted the benefits of such a transfer of power in more than 20 other states. The constant refrain is that state regulation will lower rates, speed entry of competitors and spur investment.
But another survey was released March 6 stating it just ain’t so. Granted, the survey was conducted among those most opposed to the power seachange in the first place: the local regulators. But their results aren’t even close to ambiguous.
The survey by the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors collected input from 139 local franchising authorities. They represent 10 million cable subscr...Read More

Underwriting cutbacks, channel shifts to digital Siberia and the passage of bills that eliminated long-term funding agreements are making these tough days for public, educational and government producers. They’re having to shift gears from being content creators to fundraising foundation developers, and they’re finding that shift is as slow as bringing around the Titanic.

PEG channels were initially touted as the electronic soapbox. In franchise hearings, operators bidding for the local business advocated that cable systems would provide the kind of super-local voice that broadcasters couldn’t offer, the immediacy that local papers couldn’t match. But what was promoted as a benefit is being shuttled aside by the "new, best" localism: video on demand. Those original local voices, funded by but uncontrolled by local ...Read More