Verizon today is refuting charges made by Comcast that the telecom giant is getting special treatment by the FCC, regarding an exemption from the agency’s ban on integrated set-top boxes.

The FCC had required video service providers to offer set-top boxes that have removable CableCard devices for security purposes by July 1, effectively banning integrated set-tops. Verizon, and many other companies, had applied for a waiver from that ban, and that waiver was granted late last Friday, June 29. In a July 3 letter to the FCC, Comcast attorney Jonathan Friedman accused Verizon of making a last-minute pledge to go all-digital by the 2009 deadline, in order to get the waiver. According to Friedman, the agency’s acceptance of an “ex-parte” communication “raises serious questions about the integrity of the waiver process.”

According to a Verizon spokesman, however, the conversations between Verizon and FCC regarding the set-top box waiver and Verizon’s plans to go all-digital were conducted in the open and had gone on for a period of months. In those communications, Verizon claimed it deserved a waiver of the FCC’s rules because “it is a new entrant providing video services using a unique and different technological approach (hybrid QAM/IP over a fiber to the premises network),” Leora Hochstein, executive director-federal regulatory for Verizon, wrote in a May 31, 2007, letter to the FCC. “As explained in our earlier filings, it is these factors that necessitate the grant of a waiver as contemplated by Section 629(c) in order to prevent the integration ban from frustrating the Commission’s broader policy goals of ensuring video competition and innovation.”

Hochstein’s letter went on to explain that Verizon was providing analog simulcast of some stations, including local must-carry stations, as a convenience to customers who didn’t want to buy multiple set-tops, but was not offering a separate analog service.

The distinction between analog and digital services is important because the FCC had already granted waivers to smaller cable companies who had pledged to go all digital before the FCC’s Feb. 17, 2009 deadline.

In a phone call between a Verizon executive and a member of the FCC’s legal staff on June 29, the telecom service provider did promise to eliminate its analog service by the 2009 deadline, and restated that promise in a letter dated the same day. By doing so, the company will free up bandwidth for additional digital content, particularly high-definition programming.

“This was part of an ongoing discussion, all of which was on the record,” the Verizon spokesman said.