Question. My cable provider has suddenly denied me the basic cable I've been paying for, insisting I need a box to receive these channels. Do I have any options besides paying for that device?

Answer. E-mails like this are a result of a decision by the Federal Communications Commission last October to allow cable operators to encrypt all of their signals, including the basic-tier local, public, educational and government channels that usually flow unscrambled to TVs with the right tuning hardware.

The cable industry made a decent case for this at the time: Almost nobody gets TV that way, as opposed to plugging in a box or a DVR, and encrypting the signal lets you turn service on and off remotely instead of sending somebody out on a truck that hopefully arrives within the predicted four-hour window. It would also stop some subscribers to limited service packages from watching channels they didn't pay for.

But for a tiny minority of viewers who had connected cable to HDTVs with QAM ("quadrature amplititude modulation") tuners, things may get a lot worse. They not only lose their simple, one-remote-control access to local stations, they may have to choose between downgrading to standard-definition reception — if the free digital adapters cable operators hand out only provide standard-def output — or paying for an HD tuner.

For example, since RCN shut off "clear QAM" in almost all of its markets on Wednesday, this small subset of HDTV owners is looking at paying an extra $9.95 per month, per set, for RCN's newly-mandatory boxes.

RCN is making this change more abruptly than other providers. Comcast, for instance, is moving to scramble all of its channels too, but it says it will provide a high-definition adapter for free for the first year and won't require customers to get a full-fledged tuner box.

(Disclosures: I wrote about this issue for the Consumer Electronics Association last year — when I failed to foresee the problem with HD box-rental costs, then repeated that oversight in a later column here. Another one of my other freelance clients, Discovery Communications, owns a few cable channels.)

This might not be such a hang-up if you could buy a box yourself instead of renting one from the cable company. But outside of TiVo's digital video recorders, almost nobody does this — other companies making hardware that worked with the "CableCard" standard gave up after weak sales and poor support for it from cable operators.

The FCC's ruling last October did allow one way out for owners of digital-video receivers that also included QAM tuners, such as Boxee's Internet-media boxes: Cable operators must provide basic channels to those gadgets as an encrypted Internet feed, something that Comcast has begun to do.

The absence of cable-compatible video gear in the U.S. can become more annoying when you realize that in other parts of the world, there are such things: I was irritated to see multiple Blu-ray recorders supporting Europe's DVB-C standard at the IFA electronics trade show in Berlin last summer.

Your best hope for ditching the cable box may lie in your TV service someday letting you watch most or all of its channels over the Internet — with a sufficiently fast connection, and most likely with hardware you don't own yet. Time Warner Cable subscribers can now tune into "up to 300" channels online through a Roku box, and Verizon recently expanded the number of Fios channels available on Microsoft's Xbox 360 video-game console to 75.

I also saw Cablevision demonstrate Internet reception of its channel lineup at the cable industry's annual convention last May, but that has yet to result in something subscribers can use.

Tip: Your cable company might have free Wi-Fi waiting outside.

Last May, five large cable operators announced a plan to provide free Wi-Fi to each other's customers in and around major cities. This CableWiFi initiative now lets subscribers to Bright House Networks, Cablevision's Optimum, Comcast Xfinity, and Time Warner Cable get online wirelessly; Cox customers, however, can't yet log into that wider wireless universe.

To use this if you're within range of one of these tens of thousands of hot spots, look for a wireless network named after your cable provider ("Bright House Networks," "optimimumwifi," "xfinitywifi," "CoxWiFi," "TWCWiFi") or just "CableWiFi," then enter your cable account's username and password. Comcast and TWC also offer limited free access to non-subscribers.

Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.