After nearly two years of court battles and thousands in legal fees, the City of Dearborn, Meridian Township and Comcast have reached a tentative settlement that will allow Dearborn and Meridian customers to keep watching CDTV on the same channels under their basic cable plan.

The City of Dearborn is expected to announce details of the tentative settlement as early as this week, which would include Dearborn and Meridian Township dropping their federal lawsuit against Comcast. Both municipalities also would agree to withdraw their petition with the FCC against Comcast.

The city sued Comcast because the cable giant was planning to provide public, educational and government access channels, or PEG, in a digital format only.

This change would have forced Dearborn Comcast customers to subscribe to Comcast’s digital TV service, have a newer TV that can accept digital signals or get a digital converter box to enable their older TVs to get channels in the 900 range, where channel surfers rarely trend. Customers would need a converter box for every TV for which they wanted to watch PEG channels on.

While Comcast said the converter boxes would be provided free of charge the first year, it was unknown what the cost would be after that for its customers.

At some point, a Dearborn city lawyer tells us, Comcast will eventually digitize all of its channels, including PEG access. With Comcast up to their neck trying to merge with NBC Universal, the Dearborn lawsuit appears to have been a distraction the cable giant did not need.

This was a long court battle — two years – and an expensive one in terms of legal fees, particularly for Meridian Township who had to hire an outside law firm to represent them. A lawyer for Dearborn tells us the township had legal fees in the hundred of thousands of dollars.

It was a case worth fighting. As Dearborn’s legal case argued, such a change would have been financially difficult for many senior citizens and low-income residents. It also would have slowed the distribution of information to residents who rely on CDTV as their primary means to obtain news from Dearborn.

Prior to this tentative deal, a federal judge in January 2008 ruled in Dearborn’s favor, issuing an order blocking Comcast from making the PEG channel switch.