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Oh goodie. VeryHappy has yet to do anything about her cable/phone/internet bill, but she’s all ears.
@thumper1 and @skieurope Thank you both! I was out of the country and on a CC hiatus for the first 3 weeks of the year so totally missed this thread. I’ll read it through.
So happy to see this thread bumbed up. Coincidentally I was going to try to find it because I got a better deal today. We were paying Xfinity the Triple Play. We have the service where we get ESPN, the sports channels, etc.
I called 1-800-Comcast and made it through…finally…to a customer agent. I just said that our bill has sky rocketed and I have friends that are paying less and getting HBO and Showtime. We currently were paying $232.85. She immediately launched in to promotions they could give existing customers.
I had two choices. $30 less and they would add on Showtime, The Movie Channel and upgraded Internet fir 24 months…or $40 less, Showtime, The Movie Channel and no upgraded Internet for 12 months. I took the first.
My bill is now $199.75…I didn’t have to really argue at all. It was worth the call. We already had STARZ.
Glad you are happy with that reduction @raclut
My goal is to NOT pay $200 a month for Internet/phone/TV. That is simply too much.
The whole “upgraded” internet thing burns my britches btw. I don’t want more for a little less. I want the same for a lot less, at least a heck of a lot closer to what new customers are getting. :-L
What is a good price, then. We have caller ID, a couple other minor add on’s. I remeber when our phone line was $85 just by itself with ma bell. Seriously, what is a good deal? I just don’t know.
I don’t know what a good deal is. But less is more to me!
Right now, we pay $55 a month for a wall phone and DSL. Then we pay $35 a month for basic cable…12 whole channels. No sports. No CNN. Basic. We have three smart phones on an ATT plan for $150 a month.
It’s the cell phone cost I’d like to,reduce…but I want the same data, and coverage. And iMessage!
DH says he is getting an antenna. Once he gets that…poof. We will discontinue the cable TV.
I would toss our landline in a heartbeat but we have an alarm system that calls what has to be a landline if there is indications of a problem - we have to give a password or otherwise they send the police. Otherwise the landline is totally useless to us and it’s just a receptacle for robocalls and telemarketers. We never answer it.
@thumper1 What cell phone network are you on and are you locked into a contract right now?
It’s rhe sports channels that are so expensive…The guys won’t give them up.
We pay $62/month for landline and DSL cable throughout the house. We pay another $20/month for basic cable (12 channels). We also pay $112/month for 4 lines of T-Mobile with 2.5gb per line data, which is plenty for us.
With Sprint, we used to pay $225 for 4 lines with unlimited data. We are fine halving the cell costs, as we still have more data than we need.
We could get all our cable, landline and wireless for less than the $82/month we currently pay, but we like that currently we will still have phone if the power goes out, which it does periodically. I think we’d save about $20/month, but we will make the switch when they say outlet landline will go down during a power outage. I feel the prices we are paying work well for us.
I’d like to get the TV portion of my bill down. I rarely watch it, and when I do, I’m frustrated by 3000 channels, half of which don’t come up. I think 12 - 20 channels sounds nice and manageable. Simplifying will be just as satisfying as saving money.
We rarely ever watch tv, so can’t justify adding any channels.
@doschicos contract ended in October. ATT. To be honest, we have gotten great service from them…believe it or not. But the prices…yikes. However, I am going to see what they have to offer as their costs also seem to be coming down. This last two year plan was $50 less a month than the previous one!
Last year, I negotiated to pay around $152/month with Cox for cable/internet/landline. When that 12 month promotion was up, I called them to see what they could do for this year. Just threatening to go elsewhere or cancel services doesn’t seem to work anymore. The new rate is $164/month, but without the free HBO and SHO we had last year. We didn’t really care about losing those premium channels, but didn’t appreciate paying more for less service.
If I didn’t agree to that new promotional rate, we would’ve paid $78 more than last year. I could’ve paid $10/month less this year than the $164 I’m paying, but that would’ve locked us in for 12 months. We’re still considering cancelling cable, but I want DH to really consider how he’ll feel if he can’t watch his beloved Yankees this spring/summer (We can’t get them on mlb.com because they’d be blacked out here).
That is my pain threshold also. I got motivated by my most recent Time Warner Cable bill that jumped to $240!! I had been on a promotion for HBO+Cinemax+Showtime which we never watch… at all… nothing! which added $40 to the bill.
When I called TWC to reduce service I had a very different experience. In the past they always tried to sign me up for MORE crap and were reluctant to reduce service. This time, the person I spoke to was very helpful, asked me questions about what I watched and what I used internet for, and actually suggested ways I could reduce service! My guess is they are now more worried about cord cutters than anything else. So in addition to cancelling those premium services I reduced my internet speed and knocked my bill down to $185. I also recently bought a cable modem for $60 to stop paying $10/month rental fee.
I recall back in the Old Timey Days that my phone bill was only $20 per month, the six local broadcast channels and two cable channels were free, and postage stamps were less than 20 cents each. 
Verizon offered me landline service using my same phone number for only $23 per month plus tax and a one time installation fee. So I called Time Warner’s retention unit, and a nice lady did a breakdown of services provided with me. She went to review my situation and came back with a reduction of $17 per month getting me down to $183 for my bundle package. If I bring them one of three boxes that we have then they will take another $10 off my monthly bill.
She did point out that if I dropped the bundle package and switched the landline to Verizon then I would only save $10 per month! I’ve been with Time Warner for almost 38 years so it’s hard to break up with them.
Just canceled our Sling trial today. There’s no way to permanently set the bit rate lower which bugged me. It keeps resetting back to full HD every time the app is started. Normally I wouldn’t have a problem with that, but since our ISP has a data cap, it is a problem.
Also, now that we’ve gone over 3 weeks without ‘traditional’ network TV, we are realizing that “a la carte” programming is more our style. I like being able to just select a show/episode and watch it, rather than network TV deciding what I should watch at any given time.
Our plan now is to stick with Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, and Netflix and go with an HD antenna.
We cancelled Sling for pretty much the same reason…that and the choppy broadcasting at our bandwidth,
Right now…we have wall phone and DSL for $55, and basic cable (believe me…it’s very basic…12 channels) for $35 a month. So that’s $90. But really, we are actually paying for three networks and PBS…and a bunch of local cable access channels…and that one that always has the nun on it. Not worth $35.