Seems like the latest craze in ISPs is to bundle internet with tv & landline, but all I want is internet at a reasonable price. Can someone make some recommendations? I live in New Jersey if that helps any.

The only recommendation I can give you is to take just the internet, I save about €10 a month by not having TV (I have the landline though).

In the US, you often have to pay more for the privilege of not having the other half of the bundle. Or at least that's what I remember.

The real problem is that the options that use TV and Phone infrastructure tend to suck. Most of the phone companies and telephone companies do a shit job when it comes to providing internet in the US. One really wants fiber, but that's rarely an option, unless you pay for it yourself to be brought to your house, which is really expensive.

No suggestions. We have Centuylink (telco) here and can buy a la carte. Works well for us, here.



What cracks me up is the package buyers in the family who change providers about every 18-24 months, complaining about the price. Well, no shit! The intro price is good for 6-12 months and then it cranks up to some price that is nearly impossible to weasel out of the provider when you sign up at the intro rate.

"Okay, I understand it's $59.99 plus another 50% in taxes and fees... today. How much a year from now when the deal goes bye-bye?"
"Well, we don't know what those rates will be."
"Okay, then how much does this stuff cost today for someone who doesn't have the package?"
"I can't look that up because you would be a new customer."
"Really? You can't look up the current regular rates?"

The employees on the phone actually have a lot of leeway on pricing. In the past, I've called and gotten 30% drop, and friends of mine who are better at arguing have gotten much more significant drops. You can argue that you have no use for phone or television signal, or you can argue (as I did) that your neighbour is paying a much lower price for the same services. (I don't think the person to whom I spoke had any access to the price my neighbour was paying, though I had her bill in my hand.) He claimed my neighbour had gotten a deal, and I argued, "Why would I pay 50% more for the same service another person in the same building receives?" And they gave me her rate.

Anyway, come up with a strategy, read up on how to approach this, and be prepared to ditch your provider if they won't satisfy.

Yeah, gotta love those stupid bundle deals. "You'll save so much buy paying for this awesome bundle!" Yeah... no. Best thing to do is if it's a good starting deal is to just take it and when it's time for that price bump to call them up and say you're going to cancel the service. From personal experience, I swear they fall over backwards just trying to keep your business at that point. It's rare not to get a good deal still when doing that. All it takes is a good bit of insistence.

I wouldn't want to be that employee though, having to worry about bad marks due to potentially losing customers. Heh.

This does work but only if there is a competitor in your area. Unfortunately, where I live, there is a monopoly unless we want to move to a dish - and the internet from both of those providers bites.

So you offer excellent advice for someone in NJ where there are multiple providers - bargain now and keep bargaining ;-)

My brother's family had been doing that for a few years but the provider eventually said "Uhh, no." LOL. Now they just went with cable internet and a couple Roku boxes, paired with Netflix and Hulu accounts; they have Amazon Prime, as well, but don't use that much for video content. Also using an HD antenna to pick up the locals. Pretty happy with it, I guess.

We could go that route but I love the picture quality of DirecTV a bit too much. That, and I'm not sure our 10Mb DSL has quite the bandwidth for full HD streaming - and I don't want to change to the cable 'net provider around here.

I've been wondering that myself. Almost every Internet provider in my country bundles at least the landline with Internet access, which means extra $15 for a feature I'll never use. I've got a good cellphone plan and I use it for all my phonecalls, which tend to last under 5 min. anyway. There's one Internet provider here that bundles only Internet and TV for a very reasonable price, but they don't provide their service in my street. They say it wouldn't be cost-effective for them to install the infrastructure (either a dish or optic cables, I'm not sure) if I'm going to be their only subscriber in that street. So they advised me to persuade some of my neighbours to subscribe to their services. I sure refuse to do their marketing for them!

IMHO, it's a bad idea to ditch the landline completely. The landline is going to work even when other methods of communication don't. I'm not sure it's worth $15 a month, but having a landline with one of those older telephones means that you can call out when the power is out and you might not be able to count on the cellular signal going on.

AHAHAHAHA, you live in NJ. I live in NJ too.

Not if the power is out in the central switches :). Today's phonelines are also through optical fiber. Anyway at least we have something cheaper and better here in Eastern Europe (which for most other stuff isn't true). A 100Mbps line is about $12/month and a gigabit one is $20.

Down under I'm with TPG. They did, and still do, pure Broadband plans when we signed up.

Maybe where you live. But in much of the world it's still copper carrying it's own electrical supply. Interesting to hear about Eastern Europe, I guess you guys largely skipped that stage of development.

That's it exactly, USA pays for the research/development of new communications. Other countries that have just gone strait to fiber save a ton of money on infrastructure.
Replacing all the old copper lines with fiber is so very costly, specially since usa is really spread out, I'm sure a % of our bills is directly related to this process.

ps. i hate my cable tv, I get dozens of channels I don't want... and can't get rid of to reduce cost.
Why do I need spanish and french channels and like 50+ sports channels?
Also I don't get the BBCNetwork here :(, just adding that one channel adds $9 to my monthly bill.