All areas of the Columbus market should be hooked up to digital by the end of July, spokesman Michael Pedelty said.

“The Columbus area is 90 percent complete. Westerville, Worthington (and) Bexley will be completed in the next couple of weeks,” Pedelty said.

The upgrade to digital launched in April and has focused on different areas of Columbus upgrading each week. The goal of going all-digital in Columbus and removing analog signals allows Spectrum to offer faster internet speeds, more HD and On Demand options, officials at Spectrum owner Charter Communications have said.

A key point in making the process go smoothly was that the vast majority of customers already have adopted digital devices for at least one television in their homes, he said. Only those television sets that had been connected directly to the cable outlet on the wall needed a digital receiver.

In other parts of Ohio, when the digital upgrade occurred, there was confusion, frustration and even some outrage, according to news reports. In an attempt to prevent such issues, Spectrum notified customers about upgrade dates via direct mail, bill messages, phone calls and messages that appeared on their televisions.

In addition, Columbus was one of the last of the former Time Warner Cable markets to get the complete upgrade, “and (Spectrum owner) Charter has done it a lot, so they brought a real focus to it,” Pedelty said.

“Having said that, you’re impacting the network when you do this, so things can happen. But by and large, it’s been extremely smooth — especially when you consider we are completely upgrading the network from analog to digital.”

The faster internet speeds resulting from the upgrade are an important feature as Spectrum tries to answer the challenge of competitors wooing dissatisfied subscribers who have “cut the cord,” said telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan.

Even cord-cutters still need internet access if they want to watch more than local over-the-air stations, which means that total price even for TV service delivered via the internet can be close to a standard cable fee.

Spectrum is attempting to answer customer desire for “a la carte” selections with Spectrum TV Choice, which offers local broadcast channels plus a choice of 10 popular national networks from a list of 65 that includes such standard cable fare as CNN, Discovery, ESPN, Fox News, HGTV, Lifetime, Nickelodeon, TBS and USA, among others.

http://www.dispatch.com/news/20180711/spectrums-digital-update-in-central-ohio-nearly-complete