Remember back in the old days when competition first entered the Long Distance provider market? You kept seeing ads for various long distance plans, but the catch was that if you didn’t call and specifically ask for those plans, they kept you on whatever plan you were on. So despite seeing ads for 25¢/min long distance* you’d still be paying the exorbitant rate you always were until you asked for the new one.

For various reasons I don’t feel compelled to go into right now, I’m looking to economize and spend less money. I started working out ways to accomplish that, and I eventually landed on ditching my cable TV, and scaling back my DSL service as prime candidates. The current DSL plan from Speakeasy had me paying about $115 after taxes for 3.0/768 with 8 IP addresses. I no longer needed that many IPs, so I thought it would provide pretty good cost savings to scale back. Was I wrong!

Turns out, the various options presented to me involved going to a single IP address and saving $5 a month, or dropping to 1.5/768 and saving $5/mo. I couldn’t believe it, I thought I was going to have to keep the cable and get a cable modem for cheap broadband — a very distasteful option to me. Then my sales rep said “Let me check the business plans.”

I’ve no idea what the logic in this is, since business plans tend to cost more than residential plans, but, lo! He found a plan that had 3.0/768, 8 IP addresses, a bunch of features I didn’t already have like domain hosting, all for $25 less per month. By asking for a lower priced plan, I ended up getting more services as well.

I wonder how long I was paying too much.  Do I need to call every month and see if there’s a better deal out there?  Bleah.

In any case, that little adventure shaved over $85 off the monthly expenses — over $1000 a year. Excellent.

* Eek! Imagine that in today’s market!