FCC handles flood of 700,000 DTV callers this week

More than 317,000 calls came into the FCC's toll-free DTV help line yesterday (PDF), the agency reported, as stations said farewell to analog signals. The FCC termed that number "extraordinarily high." Total calls in the runup: Nearly 700,000 between June 8 and 12. Almost 30 percent of callers asked technical questions about their digital converter boxes. "Most" of those, said the FCC, were taken care of with directions for rescans of the boxes to receive channels that had moved to new frequencies. Check out Current's story from this week's issue on the 2.7 percent of American households that were unprepared for the switchover.