Our telecom bill is huge; for cable (no premium channels), cable modem, landline, and my iPhone, it’s about $250. I’ve tried to get AT&T to give me a deal on the landline and iPhone, but to no avail.
The cable company, however, will take over my landline at a total price for everything but the iPhone at $5 more than I now pay for the cable and modem alone. Admittedly, this is an introductory rate, but it rises by only $10 after one year.
I don’t like duopoly, but it’s better for me the consumer than a monopoly; and there are other threats — satellite TV, for example — that limit pricing even more. How can the cable company offer me a price for all the cable services only $5 above my current price? Easy — the marginal cost to them is tiny. The cable service is already there; but if I switched cable service to AT&T, they would lose a lot. This is a good move for them. I only wish I had switched earlier.
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I did the same thing recently. I got Sky+ (think Tivo if you’re American) with internet and phone for the same price as I was paying before, WITHOUT Sky+. The result? I’m having the best TV watching days of my life, for no extra overall cost.
You must not have AT&T’s Uverse service available yet. It’s the equivalent “triple play” of what the cable company offers, but it requires AT&T to build out a fiber connection to your neighborhood.
BTW, you’ll make up your $$ savings with cable in terrible reliability on your phone and horrible customer service. Have fun!
Then there are those out of loop places such as your phone company that require for a land line (I bet that made you think “huh?”). Or the takeout place I call at least twice a month.
Of course with the cost of land line I can call better take out place.
What’s worse is living in a building that has contracts with companies and so you’re FORCED to use certain providers and thus reduce your ability to bundle.
I bought a Condo in August, my first place, and the only two I have are cell phone and cable internet, that’s it. I get calls from Cablevision all the time trying to rope me into their triple play package. At the very least it’s fun to hear the telemarketers get stumped when they ask who my current phone and TV providers are and I tell them ‘no one’. There’s a 5 or 6 second pause and you can almost hear them thinking about what they should do next.
Cable would be so much better if you could choose a package of channels that you wanted to view. I’d be fine with having only 20 channels to watch, but cable is SO bloated that it seems to make much more sense to watch things online.
It isn’t feasible for everyone, but I dropped cable and the landline. Cable internet online has Hulu and all kinds of ways to watch cable channel shows for free (legally). So I get cable internet for $55 and cell for $40 (no internet, obviously). Even if I added the iPhone plan instead of the regular cell phone, adding $100 on top of that for the additional privilege of adding a landline and cable tv channels just doesn’t seem to make economic sense to me
Like many others, I find the only reason I haven’t given up cable yet is sports coverage.
As soon as I find a satisfying way to view sporting events online, I will drop cable.
The recent live video provided online for events such as the men’s NCAA basketball tournament and the Masters was in ways even superior to both network and cable’s coverage–I loved having the option of being able to watch any basketball game during the tournament in real time.
I look forward to seeing what improvements the future will bring.