Can you hear me now?

I think that I'm edging nicely towards codgerhood. I do not understand telephone pricing.

I thought that there were two ways of paying for a phone. You either go in and pay them a set fee, and you have a phone (just the phone, not the service), or you go in and pay them less, with an additional monthly cost for a service. Like the old deal of giving the razor away and selling the blades, this made the company their money through the phone service.

Apparently, the first option either doesn't exist, or exists only if you are willing to pay an extremely high price. Case in point: the Samsung D357. After years of being fairly happy with our existing phones, we've decided that we'd like to get something with a speakerphone. The D357 looked pretty nice, so we looked into the cost.

If we're willing to scrap the discounted plan we have now, which is twenty bucks a month for both phones, and go with the minimum plan's cost forty bucks a month, we can get two for a hundred dollars. Otherwise, we can get two for five hundred dollars.

Okay, lets do the math.

Four hundred dollar difference up front versus twenty bucks a month. Twenty months to reach equivilence. We own the phones, we have the cheaper plan rate.

On the other hand, with the offered plan, we could drop one of our two landlines. Okay, whats that, ten bucks a month? So the net additional cost is essentially about ten bucks a month. We still own the phones.

Hmm.....
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Update: Over the last two days I've spent about two hours on the Cingular web site, trying to take their 'Premium' Buy One Get One Free offer.

They lie, big time.