In the new issue of Consumer Reports, the cover story is their annual look at TV, phone and Internet service (Here’s a news article about it.). Their description of cable’s position in the marketplace is perhaps the most positive that I’ve seen in CR’s coverage, but I do have a few nits to pick with the article.

The good news is that some cable operators receive high marks from consumers about the service they receive. While some cable companies are not viewed positively, there seems to be a general air against incumbents. In other words, when it comes to video service, the incumbent cable providers are not viewed as positively as newer competitors; however, when it comes to telephone service, cable is viewed more positively than traditional phone providers.

In addition, Consumer Reports’ reader survey points out something that’s been known for some time: Customers who take bundled service are happier with their provider. Since cable first rolled out Internet access and then telephone service – as well as services such as DVRs, HD and digital cable – we have seen the take rates increase dramatically for the new services. Consumers are getting more out of their cable subscriptions, and by bundling Internet access and phone with their video service, they’ve also been able to see savings.

Now for a few factual problems…

The article lumps together the services provided by the phone companies (AT&T’s U-verse & Verizon’s FiOS) as “fiber-optic service.” In fact, while Verizon has widely deployed fiber, AT&T is still using twisted copper pair. You may recall that cable has a hybrid fiber-coaxial infrastructure.

A sidebar of the costs of TV service completely bungles its analysis of the impact of CableCARDs, but more distressingly, the article gets its description of E911 wrong.

Emergency 911 service varies among technologies. Fiber phone service uses the same long-proven location system as a landline phone. New cable-phone and other VoIP 911 services are less universally dependable.

The section on emergency phone use seems to confuse cable’s phone service, which transports your call over cable companies’ privately managed IP networks, with VoIP services such as Vonage, which use the public Internet for transport. The concern is that when a customer calls into a 911 operator, emergency responders should be able to know where the household is located – and that in the case of VoIP calls transport entirely over the public Internet, that may not be possible. Cable operators do not have this problem. As the article notes, phone service from cable or U-verse/FiOS may need to instead rely on a cell phone in the case of a power outage.

In a section on Internet speeds, the article argues that only 1 Mbps is necessary for most customers. That’s not a problem for cable customers, since the average standard speed typically exceeds 5 Mbps, but it seems a little silly to argue that very high speeds, such as cable is offering now through the DOCSIS 3.0 standard, are mostly a “marketing game.” Certainly, not everyone needs 50 to 105 Mbps, but I think 1 Mbps is hardly adequate these days.

I also found it telling that they buried the cord-cutting strategies at the back of the article. You can just rely on an antennae and over-the-air broadcast television, but if you have reception issues, then you’ll be out of luck. You can turn to the Internet, but content is limited there as well, and you’ll still need to subscribe to an Internet connection.

In the end, it seems like consumers are being serviced quite well by today’s vibrantly competitive marketplace.

As the Feb. 17 date gets closer, we not only see more coverage of the DTV Transition, we also get more confusion about what the transition is and what it is not. For our part, the cable industry has run an extensive consumer education campaign to alert cable and non-cable viewers about the changes coming next February.

So far, that includes TV advertising valued at $200 million. Not only has NCTA produced PSAs, but cable companies have also produced spots explaining the transition.  We have created a consumer website aimed at educating the public and participated with broadcasters, satellite companies and the telcos in multi-industry outreach to make sure consumers experience little disruption during the switch.

I want to make one key point here: A key component of our advertising campaign was directed at helping people learn how to get digital television without the use of cable. We were directly promoting a competing technology.

You can find our DTV spots at NCTA’s YouTube channel. Our advertisements were promoting the NTIA’s TV Converter Box Coupon Program, which allowed you to request a coupon that can be used to obtain a converter box so that you could receive digital TV on your analog set through an antenna. Our PSAs didn’t even promote our DTV website (Get Ready for Digital TV), but rather the NTIA’s www.DTV2009.gov.

At any rate, despite that education campaign, there are still many people confused about the DTV transition. So, let’s walk through the essentials.

The DTV Transition concerns the nation’s full power over-the-air broadcast TV stations preparing to switch to an all digital system in 2009. It is not cable’s transition.

As part of easing the move, some cable operators are promoting low-priced tiers called “lifeline service” for customers looking for an alternative for rabbit-ears reception of television. We also crafted a voluntary carriage commitment so that full power broadcast TV stations would be available on cable’s analog tiers for three years.

Given all of this, I was dismayed to see a new editorial from Consumer Reports magazine, entitled “Confused about cable?” The piece argues that cable operators are “using confusion about the forthcoming digital TV transition” to raise rates.  The “confusion” they’re referring to is the confusion between the DTV switch and cable’s own transition from analog delivery to digital.

While the broadcasters are converting to digital broadcast transmission due to government mandate, cable is transitioning to digital compression to serve our customers better.

I’ve written about this issue multiple times:

• Clearing up the DTV Transition
• The two digital transitions
• Separating the two transitions
• Once more – there are two transitions…

Bottom line: The broadcasters have their transition, we have ours. Cable’s efforts to move analog channels to the digital tier in order to free up bandwidth has been going on for years and will continue after Feb. 17 has come and gone. The two transitions have nothing in common, since digital cable and digital broadcast television are two separate technologies that only have the word “digital” in common.

Here’s an example. The CU article starts this way:

Should they sit down now to watch the Animal Planet channel, Heather Shorr and her daughters would no longer see snow leopards—just snow. Shorr, a Connecticut homemaker, says their cable provider has moved the channel onto a digital tier.

That’s a cute pun on “snow,” but it makes no sense. If Animal Planet was on channel 34 on the analog tier and it was moved to channel 112 on the digital, you wouldn’t see snow. You’d probably just see a different channel in its place. The use of the word “snow” probably makes the confusion worse by making it sound like a DTV Transition issue, when it is not.

Cable companies will eventually migrate all customers to digital, since multiple analog channels can be compressed into the space of one digital channel.  That additional capacity can be used to deliver more HD channels, faster Internet connection speeds or other services to come.

While the timing of the two transitions is unfortunate, and it has created a a little bit of a brouhaha, the fact is the DTV transition was supposed to be done quite some time ago, and our digital transition had begun before Congress set the hard date for the DTV switch (digital cable is a decade old).

Despite all that, we’ll keep plugging away, so that consumers can have a clear sense of the issues.  We will do all we can to ensure consumers (and reporters) have all the information they need to tell the two transitions apart, and to understand them both.