In case you’ve managed to miss the news, tonight at midnight will mark the original DTV transition date, when full power over-the-air broadcast stations were supposed to shut off their analog signal and just broadcast in digital.  According to the FCC, 421 stations will do so tonight.  Since 220 stations have already made the switch, that means 641 stations – or 36% – will have met the original deadline, even though the date has been extended to June 12.

As we’ve made clear in the past, the cable industry is ready to handle the broadcast transition situation, however it plays out.  We’ve spent over $250 million so far in education efforts directed at consumers. More recently, we have participated in the creation of an integrated private/public plan for the DTV Advisor Hotline. We’ve been working closely with the broadcast networks; state broadcasting associations; the National Association of Broadcasters and its member local broadcast stations; the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing; and other stakeholders in the DTV Transition, to develop this call center plan that will leverage an interactive automated voice answering system and several thousand live operators during a period leading up to and after the digital transition.  In addition, the FCC has increased staffing at a call center housing its DTV help line. If you have questions, call 1-888-CALL-FCC for assistance.

Just to reiterate our earlier messages, if you’re already a cable customer, and all your TVs are hooked up to cable, then you most likely don’t need to do anything at all. Relax and enjoy your television.

(In the photo above [Credit: Bill Cramer/Wonderful Machine], we see Shareef Graddy and his fellow technicians at Comcast’s call center in Cherry Hill, NJ on Monday, poised to help consumers who want to make the switch from “rabbit ears.”)

NCTA’s annual conference The Cable Show is coming up soon. The 58th Annual Convention and International Exposition will be held in Washington, DC in less than seven weeks; you can follow details about the event on the Show’s blog or by following CableShow on Twitter.

Today, my colleague Joy Sims has prepared a report on a pretty cool exhibit we’ll be having at The Cable Show: Broadband Nation.

Talking about the benefits of broadband and how we can expand the number of Americans with high-speed connections is all the rage here in Washington, especially as Congress deliberates over an economic stimulus bill that may include billions for broadband.

Those of us in Cable Land think the attention on broadband is long overdue, and as the nation’s largest provider of broadband service with a near national and scalable network that is delivering market-leading speeds, we are excited to jump aboard the broadband train.

So, what are the many ways which consumers can benefit from broadband?  You can see for yourself at a 22,000 square-foot Broadband Nation exhibit that will be the centerpiece of NCTA’s annual Cable Show being held April 1 -3 at the Washington, D.C. Convention Center.

This large-scale broadband exhibit will demonstrate how consumers can use broadband in their homes, communities and beyond.  Details about the exhibit were announced last week, and we’ll be sharing more information in the coming weeks.

Broadband Nation is being designed to replicate real communities anywhere in America and will include urban, suburban and rural settings.  These communities will be complete with an entertainment center, school, medical clinic and small business.  To the left, you can see a small-scale mockup of what Broadband Nation will look like on the show floor.

Visitors to the exhibit will have hands-on access to see how the latest – and future – broadband technology can be integrated into a suburban home or an urban loft; a school; a small business; and a health clinic.  A cable company’s office – also located within the exhibit – will help guide the operations within the communities.

Technology to be on display will include:

• Next generation, ultra fast high-speed Internet (aka DOCSIS 3.0) demo provided by Comcast
• RF Over Glass (RFOG) fiber-to-the-home
• WiMAX Mobile Broadband
• tru2way TVs
• Broadband-based, whole-home automation and entertainment solutions
• Comcast’s HITS AxIS service which Multichannel wrote about following its introduction last May
• Specialized medical technology for health clinics, such as telehealth applications
• Enhanced RV-based applications for home
• 3-D TV

Want to register or learn more about The Cable Show?  Check out www.thecableshow.com where the lineup of speakers, sessions and activities is available and constantly being updated.

Regular readers of Cable Tech Talk may remember an exchange between Verizon’s Tom Tauke and NCTA’s Kyle McSlarrow that took place last June.  At issue was an FCC decision into allegations that Verizon had violated retention marketing restrictions and actively tried to prevent customers from leaving only after the customer had put in a request to terminate their service and move their number to cable.

The phone company maintains custody of the number you own. When Verizon gets a request to terminate service and transfer your number, they have four days in which they must comply.  This is known as the porting interval.  Our argument then, as now, was simple.  Verizon has every right to offer its customers whatever package it sees fit to offer 361 days out of the year.  They should not, however, be allowed to use advance notice of customer defection as leverage against their competitors.

The FCC agreed, and found that Verizon had been improperly using the porting interval for the purposes of retention marketing.  Verizon, unhappy with the FCC’s decision, filed suit in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit in an attempt to get the FCC decision overturned.

Today, the court reaffirmed the FCC decision that Verizon was violating federal privacy rights by illegally using the number porting window for last gasp offers.

The ruling is a boost for consumers who are already saving billions of dollars each year because they have switched to cable’s digital phone service.

Once you have decided to leave a provider, they should not impede your ability to do so.  This decision is good for competition and will ensure consumers can change local telephone providers without undue harassment by the incumbent provider. NCTA also favors reducing the porting interval to two days to further expedite consumer requests.

For our part, we look forward to the continued competition for your telephone business.

Yesterday, NCTA President & CEO Kyle McSlarrow and Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott sent a letter to Senate leadership supporting the proposed broadband funding that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) would oversee, but identifying several areas of the legislation should be refined as work on the stimulus package continues.

The letter (posted on NCTA’s website) supports unifying the $9 billion in broadband grant funding at NTIA; suggests that infrastructure funding should be targeted to areas without broadband service; and proposes that private broadband providers should be eligible to receive funding directly without the need for prior approval from governmental agencies.

This is in line with earlier comments from McSlarrow on how best to improve America’s broadband infrastructure. You may have seen last week’s video, in which he discussed what goals are best considered when debating current broadband stimulus proposals.

In December of last year, in a letter to Presidential Transition Team member Susan Crawford, McSlarrow offered the cable industry’s perspectives on the communications marketplace. In that letter, he proposed that stimulus measures should be targeted to unserved areas, should be technology-neutral, should address the needs of low-income households, and should recognize the need for making computers or laptops available to those that can’t afford such technology. Other issues are touched on in the letter, which you can also find on NCTA’s website.

It’s no surprise that cable operators face competition. That’s a good thing. As we wrote in our 2008 Industry Overview:

Competition is the lifeblood of a successful and thriving marketplace, and the cable industry faces stiff competition across all the markets it serves. The consumer is the beneficiary, enjoying more choice, greater convenience and better value than ever before.

Other companies come out with new products and services and we do likewise. But it may be that Verizon is feeling the heat a bit. I’m assuming that’s why they felt the need last week to launch an attack on the cable industry’s new DOCSIS 3.0 specification, which enables wideband Internet access.

Last year, we tracked Comcast’s deployment of DOCSIS 3.0 in a number of markets. Last week, Charter Communications joined in with the launch of its Ultra60 service. Later that same day, on Verizon’s PolicyBlog, came this post: Behind Cable’s DOCSIS 3.0 Broadband Claims. Let’s break down Verizon’s arguments.

Verizon correctly note that DOCSIS 3.0 equipment employs channel bonding to deliver faster speeds (Comcast’s Extreme 50 offers 50 Mbps downstream; Charter’s Ultra60 is 60 Mbps), but also has the potential to deliver hundreds of megabits per second. Verizon leaves out the context that cable has been migrating towards an all-digital environment for years (Here is one typical post explaining the transition). They also assert that channels for use in DOCSIS 3.0 services will come exclusively by moving basic analog tier channels to digital. That is incorrect, since it ignores the use of switched digital video which allows cable operators to reclaim bandwidth in the digital tier.

Citing many analyses – yet linking only to a report prepared by the Fiber to the Home Council (hardly an unbiased source) – Verizon states that higher speeds on cable will decrease the customer experience and will require cable to upgrade.

In fact, the cable hybrid fiber-coax plant offers a great deal of capacity and flexibility in how nodes are combined to provide optimal service levels based on subscriber penetration and demand. But also unstated is the fact that FiOS also multiplexes (or combines the signals) to customers onto a shared trunk — they just do so in a different portion of their network.  In other words, even though the link to customers might be very fast, there is still a choke point where customers have to compete for bandwidth.  Too many customers trying to access the Internet at the same time can have the same effect on a FiOS network as it could on a DOCSIS network. Funnily enough, the blog post makes it sound as if Verizon doesn’t have to employ any network management at all!

Verizon makes a broad assumption regarding cable operator deployment plans for DOCSIS 3.0 services, somehow minimizing the technology because it is just now being deployed, and citing “indicators” that it won’t be deployed to all customers.

I’m not sure what tea leaves were used to make that assertion.

Comcast has been quite public in indicating it had DOCSIS 3.0 services in front of 10 million homes and businesses at the end of 2008 and plans to have it in front of all the homes and businesses it passes with plant capable of delivering 3.0 service in 2010. That’s just one cable operator out of the dozens that now have plant capable of running DOCSIS 3.0 services. Those operators pass more than 90% of residences in the United States. And DOCSIS 3.0 service has been operating quite successfully outside the US for some time now, with deployments in Japan and Singapore.

All of Verizon’s arguments ignore the huge capital expense that Verizon has made and continues to make to ultimately serve a portion (50%) of its footprint; specifically, Verizon is spending $23 billion to reach 13% of US households. In fact, they are still conspicuously avoiding neighborhoods and whole cities, as this Baltimore columnist notes. The rest of Verizon’s footprint will be relegated to DSL service, which is rapidly losing market share.

In contrast, cable’s investment to deploy DOCSIS 3.0 is modest.  And with the channel bonding that DOCSIS 3.0 permits, network speeds of 100 Mbps, 160 Mbps, and even higher will be possible.  In fact, a 750 MHz cable plant (90% of the country’s cable network miles) has a digital equivalent capacity of approximately 5 Gbps of bandwidth.

Bottom line: The cable industry feels good about the services we’re launching these days. Competition has been pretty good for us; take a look at the growth rates for cable’s phone service. I’ve seen Verizon representatives claim the company’s network is built for “decades to come” and is “future-proof.” We believe in continually getting bigger, better, faster. We believe in delivering more value over time.  I think this will be a good fight, and one that consumers will enjoy.