Triple Play

With the deregulation of the telephone industry, now we traded the monopoly for a duopoly. In many areas, now the phone company sells in addition to phone services, television. Also, the cable monolith is branching out from TV to your phone. As they both already also provide internet broadband access, they now package their services into a phone, internet, and TV combo, and call it "triple play" with supposedly one low monthly fee (although in my opinion, it should be a little less).

In my area, the offerings are Verizon Fios for $95, or Optimum for $99. While at first it appears a good deal, when I remember that my phone bill and internet access are under $45 a month, and I don't watch that much TV, I stick with what I currently have which is less than half price.

I've thought about changing the phone to a VoIP provider, such as Vonage. For the same amount of money per month on the phone end of things, I can have unlimited calling. There are three deal breakers though. The first is that I'm not sure how I would physically connect my phone to the internet without pulling Ethernet cable throughout the house. My router and DSL modem is in the basement, while my phone lines are upstairs. This is not the simple plug and play that an apartment dweller can take advantage of. The next issue is that my DSL is not that fat of a data connection (hence the affordable price), and while fine for surfing, it may not do so well with voice data and simultaneous surfing, so that's not good. The final problem (maybe I should have mentioned this first), is that if I cancel my phone service, I can't keep my DSL. Yup, those phone company bean counters are no dummies, and the DSL requires a phone account with them.

So, up to now, I've kept the status quo, not triple played anything, and been on the lookout for a new offering as this is a dynamic area. I heard that Direct TV, those makers of that mini satellite dish, were feeling left out of combo services, and expanding their offerings. Hmmm. I head on over to their website, and take a look. Turns out those satellite endowed folks are teamed up with Verizon in my area, and they can sell me both satellite TV (Choice Extra Package, 185 channels), and my same DSL for $55/month (it would go up a few dollars at the end of the year as the $14.99/month goes up to $17.99/month). This would then allow me to use Vonage as a telephone service, and the total would be around $80/month. Can I really put together my own triple play for less?

Not so fast! After reading the fine print, this is only for "new" Verizon DSL customers. So they want me to cancel the service to sign up for it again? For all of the deregulation, I'm still seeing too many restrictions on all of this. At least for now, I guess, once again, I'll stick with what I've got.

--Jonas