CEA to FCC: Deny Charter Set-Top Waiver and Come Up With Standard

The Consumer Electronics Association has asked the Federal Communications Commission to deny Charter's request for a waiver of the FCC's ban on integrated digital set-top boxes, calling its proposal a "nominal and partial 'solution' that cannot fairly be projected to work in the real world."

"There is no considered FCC precedent for the open-ended evisceration of this regulation," CEA said in comments to the FCC on Charter's request earlier this month for a two-year waiver of the prohibition. Charter says the waiver is necessary for the company to make the transition to all-digital networks and downloadable software-based security. CEA says no waiver is warranted. It says the cable industry's promise of a downloadable security standard interface the functional equivalent of the CableCARD hardware has yet to materialize after years of promises, and that Charter's partially chip-based interim solution "affords access only to a single conditional access system, and only Charter systems are likely to be able to download software that uses the conditional access hardware in the chip."