Bother Me Not

We're contemplating switching from Comcast for cable/Internet and Verizon for phone to Verizon for cable/Internet/phone.

The driver is price; we pay about $140 a month now for all three, and Verizon will charge us $100 for it, plus give a $150 rebate. Comcast offers all three, too, but their price is $114 for a year, and $130 after that.

Going with Verizon means having to change email addresses; it also means getting converter boxes for the two TVs. We have a second phone line; if we chose to keep it, we'd pay extra for it, though we don't know how much.

Going with Comcast means possibly having to change phone numbers, and saving less money.

We're leaning toward Verizon, even though their marketing stinks; the letter says call between 8AM and 12AM (ie, midnight), but calling at 8PM gets you a robovoice that says Ain't nobody here, Bill. We want you, but we don't want you that much.

The email name switch thing makes me think again about hiring an email forwarding service. Apparently, if you want to do that using your own domain name, you - surprise- need to buy the domain name, and pay for it every year. You also have to find a service to do the hosting/forwarding, and do it reliably, using decent spam filtering and god knows what else.

This makes my head hurt. My touchstone is that I only want to go through such a conversion once. Actually, I don't want to do it at all, but the idea of saving about $500 a year, even if its only for one year, is goodness.

But I want someone else to take care of it.