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| Monday, March 21, 2005 |
| Cut the Cord |
My family recently cut the cord, so to say. Previously, we owned two cell phones - one for me, one for my parents - and a home telephone "land line" with ADSL (broadband internet). When we decided it would be cheaper for us to get rid of the land line and add another cell phone, I was disappointed to find out the Bell South, at least here in Alabama, requires you order home phone service if you want their ADSL service.
Well, perhaps Bell South was then disappointed when we got rid of both our home phone service and our ADSL service, and switched to DSL's rival: the cable modem.
To no one's surprise, the phone companies who typically have a monopoly over the home phone service, and who see cell phones as a legitimate threat to their business, want to force users of their competitive broadband offerings into their much higher profit margin home phone service as well.
Cable internet and DSL internet are priced reasonably because they're in competition. Competition is good.
Home phone, "land line" service is generally not in competition and it's priced with a large profit margin. Monopolies are bad.
So here is the Bells' wager: They are counting on customers who want broadband internet staying locked into their home phone service, so they can keep advertising DSL cheaply enough to attract new customers, but continuing to charge their high prices to a slowly but definitely shrinking market of land line phones. They're hoping that happens, and not the opposite - as cable modem service continues to expand, more customers choose the cable internet and also eventually migrate away from their Bell-owned land lines altogether.
And that's what we did, and it was much cheaper. We added a cell phone for $10 more a month, dropped our much more expensive land line and kept the old land line number by assigning it to the new cell phone (something anyone can do). We changed from BellSouth DSL internet to the similarly priced Charter Cable internet and even in the process got some extra digital cable features as a 'thank you' from Charter.
So, in sum: we now each have our own cell phone, and we have more cable channels, and oh yeah - it's cheaper than when we had BellSouth coming into our house.
I'm writing about this, because the FCC is trying to undo the laws of a few states that had wisely forced their tel-co's to separate their DSL from their home phone access. The FCC is not being good here.
- tollie |
posted by Tollie Williams @ 12:26 PM   |
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