Digital TV test shows the FCC will need more phones

Although Monday's apparently successful test of the digital TV conversion in Wilmington, N.C., still must be fully analyzed, new data released Wednesday indicates one thing: Federal officials are going to get a whole bunch of calls from confused viewers when the rest of the nation makes the switch in February. The Federal Communications Commission said that 797 Wilmington residents called a special government helpline on Monday after the region's five commercial TV stations permanently turned off their analog signals at noon EDT and began broadcasting only in digital. On Tuesday, the number of calls dropped to 424. The FCC noted that those first-day calls represented "less than one-half of 1%" of the region's 180,000 TV-viewing households. And combining the second day calls, the figure is still well under 1%. But translate that to the rest of the country, which has 112.8 million TV-viewing households, and even a call volume of 0.5% would produce approximately 564,000 calls.