Reducing The Cable Bill Part II: Broadband Internet
The following is a reprint of a post that I made from my old blog Getting Out Of The Poorhouse: To find out why, see here.
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Yesterday I talked about how I was able to cut $63.75 off of my cable TV bill by cancelling my HD cable package, using a pair of rabbit ears, watching shows off of TV network websites and using Netflix. Today were going to talk about part II of the cable bill equation - my broadband internet connection.
Of the oodles of money that I used to throw my cable company monthly, $42.95 was dedicated to my broadband internet connection. At that price, I was told by my cable provider that I was getting download speeds of up to 6 mbps per second and 768 kbps upstream. “A whole lot of bang for the buck”, was what CS rep told me. He seemed to know his stuff, and it sure sounded a lot faster than my 56k dial up connection - I was sold. But now, do I still need a whole lot of bang?. A few months ago when my Halo3/Call of Duty 4 addiction was at it’s peak I would’ve said yes (Good times!) but now not so much.
So I decided to call the cable company again and tell them that I will be downgrading another service. I found out that they had a basic broadband rate that they didn’t advertise so much. It would essentially cut my down and up stream speeds by half. The price? $24.95. That’s another $18 a month in savings. So I went ahead and downgraded, thanked the CS rep and was told that it would take about 2 hours for the slowdown to take effect. I waited till the next day to test it out and here was what I found:
Surfing the Internet didn’t change at all, pages still loaded pretty fast and I was able to download files pretty quickly - about 8 Mississippi’s per mp3 of average size(about 5 MB each, downloaded legally of course!). No loss of quality in streaming shows from the TV networks and Netlfix, playback was smooth, no hiccups or cut-offs. Netflix even showed on their page that my video quality was high. Only place I noticed a drop in performance was online gaming. Popped in Call of Duty 4 for a few Deathmatch rounds and experienced pretty significant lag. I ended up finishing all of them at or near the bottom. All due to the slow down I’m sure 
So with the switch I’m able to save an additional $18 a month or $216 a year. These savings will also go into repaying down my student loans. Join us next time when I tackle my Satellite subscription.
Thanks for reading.
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