We received the dreaded yearly letter this week from our cable company...your contracted rate is about to expire, call us immediately. Today, they gave us a call today to follow-up on the threat. Shawnie quickly handed the phone over to me.
"First off, let me explain that we don't need the cable TV," I said taking charge of the call.
"We'd like to offer you our current 99$ deal. TV, Internet, and telephone," responded the nice lady on the other end.
"We tried your phone a year ago and it kept going out. What do you have for just internet?"
"We can only offer you this deal today," she said.
"I guess I'll have to look into AT&T. They offer DSL in the neighborhood now."
The phone call ends.
Now I wish I had taken AT&T up on their U-verse offer. U-verse is AT&Ts new TV system which uses the internet to feed the tv programs to a digital receiver box which connects to your TV like cable or dish. However, now when I check, the service is not available for my address. I must have made someone mad or it really was the beta test group for the neighborhood like I suspected.
Never-the-less, to keep tele-commuting and enjoying the joys of CNN political coverage, now we need to decide how to go about paying for it.
The options:
1. Drop Cable for DSL:
--AT&T Yahoo DSL (3mb) for$24.99/month
--Dish network for $49.99/month (which includes twice as many channels, with twice as many outages)
2. Keep cable and pay more (note, I called them back and negotiated down from the $99 package to pay just 10$ more than we are right now...just because I'm such a loyal customer)
"First off, let me explain that we don't need the cable TV," I said taking charge of the call.
"We'd like to offer you our current 99$ deal. TV, Internet, and telephone," responded the nice lady on the other end.
"We tried your phone a year ago and it kept going out. What do you have for just internet?"
"We can only offer you this deal today," she said.
"I guess I'll have to look into AT&T. They offer DSL in the neighborhood now."
The phone call ends.
Now I wish I had taken AT&T up on their U-verse offer. U-verse is AT&Ts new TV system which uses the internet to feed the tv programs to a digital receiver box which connects to your TV like cable or dish. However, now when I check, the service is not available for my address. I must have made someone mad or it really was the beta test group for the neighborhood like I suspected.
Never-the-less, to keep tele-commuting and enjoying the joys of CNN political coverage, now we need to decide how to go about paying for it.
The options:
1. Drop Cable for DSL:
--AT&T Yahoo DSL (3mb) for$24.99/month
--Dish network for $49.99/month (which includes twice as many channels, with twice as many outages)
2. Keep cable and pay more (note, I called them back and negotiated down from the $99 package to pay just 10$ more than we are right now...just because I'm such a loyal customer)
------------------------------
OK, its a couple of hours later and I just talked with Charter again. I agreed to stay with them for the 10$ more per month. (The current deal for the services we have). I tried to negotiate a price decrease, but with the DSL/Dish package comes contracts (or fees to go without contracts). So paying 10$ more per month is about the same for the next 12 months.
Staying with Charter we also get a speed boost from 3MB to 5MB download and no contract terms. I also don't need to buy a modem right now (a 50 or 80$ cost depending on which I chose). So the only thing we're leaving on the table is BYUTV which would have been nice to have, but its just TV anyway (right?).
My speed tests:
Before talking with Charter...
After talking with them...
After talking with them...
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