Cable

Mark Phillips of Ednor Gardens in Baltimore sees ads everywhere for Verizon's high-speed Internet and cable service. He reads about "FiOS" in the paper. He wants to be your customer, Verizon. His family keep jamming their slower DSL line with entertainment downloads. When he streams video from Hulu.com, his daughter might not be able to do schoolwork online. He doesn't really want Comcast's broadband product. FiOS lays fiber-optic cable right to your door, which he says is faster and more secure.

TIP 19 Start trimming your phone, Internet, cable costs Telecom services offer large and relatively pain-free ways to reduce household bills. Do you really need a land line telephone? Is premium cable worth the money? (Is any cable? TV stations still broadcast for free, although you'll need to buy a new TV or digital converter.) Can you really tell the difference between cable Internet and cheaper DSL? From a simple phone bill 20 years ago, household telecommunication expenses have bloomed into multiple layers that can add up to more than $300 a month.

About 47 years ago, Ralph J. Roberts founded Comcast. He was a middle-aged man who had recently abandoned the belt and suspender business, and was looking for something new. He found it in a tiny company in Tupelo, Miss., which was erecting a giant antenna to provide the local citizenry with signals from the television stations in Memphis, Tenn., 90 miles away. At that moment, Roberts became a cable pioneer. Along with Ted Turner, John C. Malone, Charles F. Dolan of Cablevision, John J. Rigas of Adelphia and a handful of others, he was one of the men who built the cable industry, pulling off one of the more unheralded achievements in modern business: getting people to pay for something they had always assumed would be free.

Sept. 7 1927 U.S. TV pioneer Philo T. Farnsworth, 21, transmitted a line image by electronic means with his "image dissector" device. 1979 Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) made its cable TV debut.

The Howard County Council unanimously confirmed yesterday the appointment of Kathleen C. Conway of Columbia as county cable television administrator.It was the final council meeting before the legislative body's August recess.In confirming Conway, the council brushed aside misgivings from a public advocate about hiring a longtime employee of Comcast Cablevision.Comcast services 60,000 customers in Howard and also holds the cable franchises in Baltimore and Harford counties.Bunny Riedel, executive director of the Alliance for Community Media, a Washington-based public advocacy group, appeared at the council's public hearing last week and questioned whether any longtime employee of Comcast could be a strong advocate for the public.

AFTER American Telephone & Telegraph Co. was broken up in 1984, it struggled to redefine itself. The nation's largest long-distance company was challenged by new rivals, stymied by rapid technological change and haunted by its own poor strategic decisions.Now, under Chairman and Chief Executive Officer C. Michael Armstrong, AT&T Corp. is waging a comeback, entering new markets through partnerships with such firms as British Telecommunications PLC and through acquisitions of companies like local telephone provider Teleport Communications Group Inc. (TCG)

The Baltimore City Council gave preliminary approval last night to a proposal to convert a Charles Street apartment building into a senior citizens' home, displacing its 150 occupants.Under the proposal, which will be up for final approval next week, the Northway Apartments at 3700 N. Charles St. would become a home for the elderly that would offer assisted living.Tenants are protesting the change, saying it will push middle-income residents out of the city and that nursing homes in the area are not fully occupied.

Challenging the cable TV industry's hopes of dominating the market for high-speed Internet connections to the home, America Online said last week that it would invest $1.5 billion in Hughes Electronics and jointly introduce a raft of new consumer services with Hughes' DirecTV unit. These include AOL-Plus, which will provide high-speed connections over satellite, and AOL TV for using TV channels for such functions as interactive shopping, Web surfing, e-mail and electronic chat.The deal will widen the choices available in the potentially huge consumer market for high-speed Internet service and interactive television.

Sometimes a monopoly just isn't enough.For years, Comcast Corp. has been the sole provider of cable TV service in a broad suburban swath that includes parts of Harford, Howard and Baltimore counties. It's been a nice gig -- cable has come to rank not so very far below electricity and water as a basic household service, and Comcast is where 300,000 households in the three counties go for their fix.But this is the late 1990s, the age of the ever-expanding, gotta-have-it-all communications behemoth.

Interest in the conflict in Kosovo has sent viewership of the all-news cable channels soaring, according to Nielsen statistics for the first seven days of the crisis.In prime time, CNN averaged 1,084,000 homes, a jump of 79 percent above the first three weeks of March, when it averaged 604,000 homes.MSNBC, which has been slumping in prime-time ratings since the Monica Lewinsky story subsided, averaged 348,000 homes, an increase of 107 percent from 168,000 in early March.The Fox News Channel averaged 269,000 homes, up 23 percent from the 219,000 homes it averaged in the first three weeks of the month.

Harford County residents will soon have another choice, and potentially a higher-speed one, when it comes to cable television service after a vote last night by the County Council. The seven-member panel voted unanimously to grant Verizon Communications Inc. a 15-year franchise to operate within the county, making it the second major cable supplier to operate there. For years, most residents who wanted cable had to subscribe to Comcast. "We consider this a very positive development," said Councilman Dion F. Guthrie, who represents the southern area of the county.

TIP 19 Start trimming your phone, Internet, cable costs Telecom services offer large and relatively pain-free ways to reduce household bills. Do you really need a land line telephone? Is premium cable worth the money? (Is any cable? TV stations still broadcast for free, although you'll need to buy a new TV or digital converter.) Can you really tell the difference between cable Internet and cheaper DSL? From a simple phone bill 20 years ago, household telecommunication expenses have bloomed into multiple layers that can add up to more than $300 a month.

Mark Phillips of Ednor Gardens in Baltimore sees ads everywhere for Verizon's high-speed Internet and cable service. He reads about "FiOS" in the paper. He wants to be your customer, Verizon. His family keep jamming their slower DSL line with entertainment downloads. When he streams video from Hulu.com, his daughter might not be able to do schoolwork online. He doesn't really want Comcast's broadband product. FiOS lays fiber-optic cable right to your door, which he says is faster and more secure.

So I just received an e-mail from a group called TV4US about Maryland residents paying an average of 6.4 percent more for cable television beginning Saturday. Says TV4US, "the cost of Comcast's standard cable package will go from $55.45 to $59, an increase of 6.4 percent. In some counties, like Montgomery, rates have increased 13.75 percent since January 2007." Comcast disputes those figures. (I'll get to this in a sec.) Comcast is not, however, disputing the fact that your cable bill is going up come Saturday.

With a miserable economy - and a gut feeling that nearly everyone who really wants high-speed Internet access and can afford it probably has it by now - I would have predicted slow growth or none at all this year in that market. Not so. Some 55 percent of Americans had broadband service at home in April this year, compared with 47 percent the year before and less than 35 percent in 2005. Only 10 percent of Americans still use dial-up Internet service at home. The figures are to be reported today by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

U sing cable, sometimes I have an excel- lent picture, sometimes good, sometimes only fair. Comcast splits the signal to the computer and to the TV. I then split the TV signal several times. I've been told I need boosted splitters. Do I? There are four TVs in the house. I've also run a cable to the motor home with a TV. Do I need to upgrade my splitters, my cable, and/or add boosting splitters? The cable I'm using is 75 ohm, RG6/U. I also have empty branches wired for cable so I can move a set as I need to. Should I avoid that?

Have you run into problems with a digital camera rejecting new AA batteries? I have a digital camera that takes two AA batteries. It gives me a message that the battery charge is low. The batteries test fine. But when I replace the batteries with brand new ones, I get the same message. ... I have this problem on my old camera (6 years old), my current camera (2 years old) and now my wife's camera (less than 1 year old). - Brian Leary This is one where readers can help. Other than guessing that the "low charge" indicator itself is defective - almost impossible on three cameras - I have no idea.

For all their ability to react instantly to a developing story, cable news channels can be surprisingly slow to make changes in their own houses. Until last week, Fox News had not altered its early evening lineup in eight years. But the cable landscape has been reshaped in recent weeks with each of the three news channels bringing in new talent to anchor some of their most competitive hours. And bucking a long-standing trend, two of the networks have ousted ideologically charged personalities in favor of more traditional and experienced journalists.

Last week on Super Tuesday, all-news cable TV made it plain that CNN, MSNBC and Fox News have displaced the major networks this primary season as the best on-screen source for political coverage. Last night, the 24/7 cable news channels were again dominant, but this time they stole the thunder from local TV news operations - making area broadcasters that were unwilling to cut into network prime-time programming seem all but irrelevant with their 11 p.m. newscasts in cities such as Baltimore.

Jan. 31 2007 Nine blinking electronic devices planted around Boston threw a scare into the city in what turned out to be a marketing campaign for a late-night cable cartoon.