Charter installs new Moto 5100, where's the BMC?

After I had read this July that Charter had purchased 80,000 units of the BMC 9012 and 20,000 units of 9022D, I called charter to hook me up the moment HD service became available in my area. And sure enough yesterday two techs came out to install my HD service.


Between the time they called to schedule the appointment and Saturday I had plenty of time to ponder the stats of the BMC boxes. Would I get DVI? YES, I WOULD! "Oh, sh&t, this thing comes with a dual tuner PVR that can record HD! I was too pumped and all my tivo co-workers had planned a night to compare Tivo to the new service. Talk about counting your chickens before they hatch!


I first got a hint that something was wrong when I saw the front of the box. Sure enough, no PVR, no DVI, no pretty interface to interact with. I knew something was going to go wrong that night. It would have been too good to be true.


At first I was frustrated, I read local articles about the PVR function. Local articles that had charter reps spewing the fact that Madison was the area to bring new generation equipment to it's market.



Why stripe down it's equipment. No DVI! I had hopes that the tech would know something about the PVR coming soon as an add-on. The box does have the USB 2 ports I had read about. He didn't even know what I meant when I said PVR.


Afterwards I looked under the STB and discovered it was the DTC-5100. Now I'm more lost than before. Should I be relieved that it wasn't a stripped down BMC model, or more disappointed that I can't even add a PVR to the equipment. (was hoping that they just stripped the hard drive out for cost reasons and you could always add the PVR). I fear that we won't see the BMC here in Madison for years. These are new boxes to Charter. I was his second install, so the chances of throwing these out in a few months look zip to zero.


Why even bring these to the table. These aren't "cutting edge", they're "catch up" equipment.

The original article I read mentioned that St. Paul was going to be getting the BMCs first (which was why I was suprised when we were getting HDTV already). Anyone know if that's going on now?