Further, the ads on TV keep promising that those of us who have cable will have "no problems", which sounds like false advertising.

They say that they are removing the Washington channels because they are duplicates. Well, that is not entirely true. Some of their late morning programs and the evening news programs come on at different times -- it certainly has messed up my evening news watching.

If I switch to digital, they say I'll get more channels, but I do not watch 90% of the channels I currently get so why would I want more channels.

Since we're paying the same amount of money for fewer channels, in my book they're cheating us. And the sad part is that there is nothing we can do about it. If there is, please let me know.

Ken Wachter of Ellicott City is less than pleased about the move:

I too am very upset by the push from Comcast to digital cable. I live in Howard County and received the same notice about the Washington D.C. channels being dropped from the analog service. Several channels were already moved earlier this year and now we have one TV with a digital cable box so my wife can get one of her favorite channels that was moved. I don't like it. It performs very slowly changing channels and if two TVs are turned on to the same channel (one digital and one analog), there is a very annoying two second delay on the TV with the digital cable box.

I agree that this is a big push to increase revenue by Comcast. The new services you mentioned at the end of today's article were all "High Definition" services which cost even more than the standard digital cable service. I was upset enough about this change that I wrote a letter (snail mail, not email) to Comcast headquarters in Philadelphia with copies going to the "Cable Administrator" of Howard County and "Consumer Protection" of Howard County. But because Howard County will benefit from the increased fees, I doubt that they will do anything to address this.

One thing that hasn't been taken into consideration is the energy wasted. I have a meter that measures the amount of energy used by house hold equipment. It doesn't matter whether the digital cable box is turned on or off. It uses the same amount of power (16 watts) either way. That's $20 per year at today's electric rates including all the charges listed on my BGE bill. That's $20 per box, so you have to multiply that by the number of boxes to get the total cost. That is a huge energy waster. If you feel the top of the digital cable box you will realize it's being wasted as "heat" which increases the air conditioning load in the summer. Perhaps our "green" County Executive Ken Ulman will take a stand on this. Multiply this across the number of house holds in the county and the amount of energy wasted is significant.

The only reason I keep Comcast now is because I don't have to have a cable converter box on every TV in the house. I can just connect them directly to the cable. No extra energy wasted for a box that's doing nothing most of the time. Once Comcast drops the analog service, I may switch to Verizon FIOS. I'm no fan of Verizon either, but I think they may have a superior technology.

Thanks for the article today. Unfortunately you have no answers and I suspect you will never see a satisfactory answer at least satisfactory to me. My answer is to make the TVs so they can directly interface with the cable system. I think some manufacturers are working on such a system, but don't think it's available yet. That's what the TV manufacturers did years ago when cable started to become popular. TVs became "cable ready". Now the only "cable ready" TVs will be the ones still on analog service.

Ken says he received a response from the company last week, but "His only response was 'I’m sorry for the inconvenience this is causing you.' I wasn’t nasty to him, but I did give him an ear full and let him know that I was not a happy customer. He repeated that same sentence over and over as I laid out my complaints."

Maria Alvarez of Columbia said the cost of switching to digital couldn't come at a worse time:

You really think additional fees of $3.95 a box and you didn't include the $17.95 for the technician to come to your house is easy and inexpensive in these times of everything going up and companies continuing to screw their customers.

DC stations are just as much a part of the households in Howard and Carroll counties as Baltimore stations as a lot of us commute to DC and at times the stations do show different programs at a drop of a dime.

This is just another ploy by Comcast to continue to shovel in the money while the rest of us get less service. It's highway robbery and a travesty.

(AP Photo)