As you know I'm taking part of this week to explore my households utility bills. This post is about our phone and internet services. Next week I will write about our major utilities including gas, water and electricity.
On average we pay $67.47/month for our phone and internet services. The break down looks like this:
This discounts are based on bundling two services together as well as owning my own modem. We pay a long distance rate of $0.04/minute which is why it varies. The increase in the bundle to have a set long distance plan would be $30/month, so it's not worth it to have that service. We also have no extra features. What I mean by that is we have no call waiting, call display, voice mail ect. My roommate Lindsay was kind enough to purchase a answering machine, which works just fine for us!
I had a look at what is currently being offered to new customers and for the same products they are offering a current bundled price of $55.95/month. If I add GST to that and compare it to what we're paying (less the long distance) - it's the exact same price. I'm both pleased and surprised to see this as often new customers get better deals then us existing customers.
The only thing we could do to save money here, is to use less long distance minutes and/or reduce our high speed internet (7MBps) to the high speed 'lite' internet (256 Kbps) plan.
I think that between $5 and $10 of long distance is reasonable considering that the families of each person in the household live, for the majority, out of the city/province. I'm also comfortable paying a bit more for faster internet.
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I think if you had all 5 computers on line at the same time, the 'lite' version might not be able to handle the traffic. Or is telephone internet different from cable? Again, when you divide bills by 5, a savings that makes 1 person go "Wow", is hardly noticed by 5 - remember the discount you negotiated on your TV. $20 is significant, but $4 ea. is hardly noticible.
I agree with your mom and was just going to say the same thing. With 5 people surfing the internet on the same connection, a LITE version will just make it slow and everyone frustrated.
A minor change could be made by signing up for a service like worldline (worldline.ca I think) (available in Canada - I use it). It is $4.00 a month for unlimited long distance. You can sign up a cellphone and a landline on the same account (i.e. $2.00 unlimited long distance per line). I used it while B was away at school in another province and saved bundles. We now use it on our landline and his cellphone. Divided by 5 people the savings aren't huge, but they add up over a year!
I think if you had all 5 computers on line at the same time, the 'lite' version might not be able to handle the traffic. Or is telephone internet different from cable? Again, when you divide bills by 5, a savings that makes 1 person go "Wow", is hardly noticed by 5 - remember the discount you negotiated on your TV. $20 is significant, but $4 ea. is hardly noticible.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your mom and was just going to say the same thing. With 5 people surfing the internet on the same connection, a LITE version will just make it slow and everyone frustrated.
ReplyDeleteA minor change could be made by signing up for a service like worldline (worldline.ca I think) (available in Canada - I use it). It is $4.00 a month for unlimited long distance. You can sign up a cellphone and a landline on the same account (i.e. $2.00 unlimited long distance per line). I used it while B was away at school in another province and saved bundles. We now use it on our landline and his cellphone. Divided by 5 people the savings aren't huge, but they add up over a year!
ReplyDelete