Saturday, February 14, 2009

Saving Money

I've followed the lead of Jaime in regards to money monthly. Recently the cable/phone/internet access as our weekend place went from the 12 month rate of ~120/mo to ~170/mo. Given we do not use this daily this was over the top.

Dropped internet from the cable company and am replacing with a DSL line from AT&T: saving $25/mo. Yes, it's 5Mb -> 768Kb but as I mentioned we do not use this often.

Dropped the all you can eat phone from the cable company and replace with a bare-bones dial up line: saving $22/mo. Yes, back to per minute charges but we just *don't* use this line much. I tried gizmo5 with an older cisco voip box but that does not work with fax lines unfortunately. Perhaps I'll setup a line-2 on our phones for outgoing.

Dropped the advanced cable with the box to basic cable. Dropping another ~$25/mo. Given we don't watch too much TV. I'd switch to over the air, but we really are remote and not much will show up.

And to top it off I don't have to deal as much with the cable company customer support - that alone is worth it. AT&T can't suck as much as this particular cable company support.

Course as luck would have it, I tried to save money last month with them and they offered to go from $170 -> $150/mo which was still too much. Explained that was not enough given our weekend usage and that I would absolutely be dropping. Told there was not anything they could do for me. When I called to drop the phone/internet services was told they could get me to a 12/month $99/mo deal - course too little/too late

Bit of a pita, but saving ~$80/mo or so for is worth it

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Is it ok to hate the UK Government?

I started back in October with UK VOD (Project Kangaroo) back in October. As I stated in that post the company had been referred to the UK Competition Commission due to fears about the ownership structure.

This week we found out the output of the findings which were not favorable to us.

I am not in a position to discuss details about what this means in public, I'll have to be somewhat silent.

What I can say is that it is disappointing, yet not at all upset that I tried to make a go of it.