t delivery of basic analog cable programming. According to Charter, the conversion from analog to digital helps recover valuable bandwidth capacity and saves money by using digital-only set -top boxes, which cost up to 50 percent less than similar analog/digital set-top boxes. The next month, Digeo Inc. and OpenTV made their interactive television service VAULT CAREER LIBRARY 2005 Vault Inc. Vault Guide to the Top Telecom Employers Charter Communications available to over 1 million of Charter's digital cable customers, the largest deployment of cable interactive TV in North America. Other legal battles A Newport Beach, Calif.-based unit of the Acacia Research Corp. accused Charter and eight other cable and satellite companies of patent infringement in a June 2004 lawsuit alleging the companies infringed on patents covering the technology used to power video-on-demand services and video streaming over the Internet. That August, Charter won a patent dispute in which Northbrook, Ill.-based Broadcast Innovation and West Perth, Australia-based IO Research claimed Charter infringed on a patent related to sending data over television broadcasts. Staging a turnaround In August 2004, Charter brokered deals with Sprint Corp. and Level 3 Communications that would enable Charter to provide local and long-distance phone service to customers in some of its markets. Charter also announced that it had tapped Accenture to provide customer service and customer acquisition support. The company had about 31,000 phone customers as of October 2004, and was in the process of making the service available to more subscribers. The company also added 108,500 high-speed Internet customers, but lost 58,600 analog video subscribers, lured away by programming offers from rival operators. That was actually not a huge loss, though, as most of the subscribers who defected were low-impact customers. To retain and increase its number of high-impact subscribers, Charter unveiled plans to invest more in customer service and launch new products, inclu