Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Comcast - my friend

Comcast sent me a letter letting me know that soon, my phone plan may be gone. (It was worded like they were doing me a favor.) We pay something like $26 a month after taxes for our phone service. About a year ago, they redid how their plans worked, and all their rates went up. Now they are trying to end the grandfathering they did with everyone else so that they can charge us more money.

As a favor to me, they are offering me 6 months under the new plan at $19.99 a month. The letter made it sound like they had to wait for regulatory permission to change, so my guess is it will be 6 months from now when the existing plans expire. The deal they are currently offering is only good for 3 weeks, so I should switch now!

The only problem with that is that I don't think they are doing me any favors, really. I see no reason to stay with a company that isn't adding any value, will be priced the same as everyone else, and want to just get more money from me.

There are 2 options now as I see it: switch to the local company that does our Internet service, or get rid of the home phone all together, and get Tara a cell plan. I don't know if Tara is ready for the second option yet, but I do think she needs a cell.

This sort of happened before. Back in the day, we had Qwest as our phone provider. One day out of the blue, we started getting charged by another company for our long distance at $0.25 a minute. This did not make me happy. Qwest had some sort of regulatory thing where they could no longer offer long distance in the mountain West, and sold all their plans. What they forgot to do was mention it to their customers. I had plenty of arguements about that one, and in the end they lost a customer. Several years later, Qwest started advertsing all the services they had (including long distance again, by then), and were "trying to win us back" as a customer. Needless to say, they didn't win us back as a customer.

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