ThreadWeaver said:
That's not how gas works here in MN. One company owns the pipes in the neighborhood, and they are the only ones that provide service. Of course another company could lay additional pipes, but no other company is willing to make the investment.
A number of years ago Ohio Gas got their asses hauled into court over the monopoly and pricing on services, and how badly they were managing it and how customers were being treated. The courts found against them and ordered that the administrative and billing be split off into other entities, and the servicing can be maintained by them.
Customers got the option of multiple billing options, billing administrators, but only one provider. But all maintenance and actual services have the same provider. You *can* get your billing to be the supplier, but the beauty of the setup is you can go through whomever gives either the best price for you or the best customer service. And can have billing based on actual use with varying contract details, or based on budget, which averages a houses use over a year to give you a consistent billing. Some allow locking of rates, which may or may not be in your favor.
It's the same with Phone, Cable and Power. The only other option to bending over for Comcast here is to bend over slightly less far for DirecTV satellite.
My Electric, Water, Sewer, StormDrainRunoff billing all work like that. I'm pretty much locked to whom supplies or services it. Sometimes a community can negotiate a slightly cheaper rate though.
DirecTV, landline phone and 15Mbps internet lumped together costs us about $190 a month. Half of that is DirecTV. Just can't get the wife to cut the cord though.
For TV I've two options, even if I get advertisements for three...
- Time Warner
- DirecTV
- AT&T is more than happy to *advertise* U-Verse TV, phone, and internet and other services to me... but they refuse to actually provide and *offer* it. A bit annoyed on that point, as while I've never had U-Verse, I had their high speed internet DSL offering for 12 mostly happy years.
For phone technically no one offers a straight landline only phone option to me, Time Warner will give one for $10.00, but requires internet. Windstream is the same in requiring internet. I can get a 3rd party VIOP phone, which also requires internet. I *might* be able to get a pure Alltell line but doubt it. I can get a cell phone option form a number of places, but that is not a true landline phone option.
For Internet I've three options (not counting AT&T, see above). All three have a TV option as well.
- Time Warner
- DirecTV
- Windstream - TV option called Merge and requires internet.
Windstream is the only one that will offer pure DSL without the other options though. Windstream is by far the cheapest, even after the promo period, though slowest of the three.
Also, Windstream TV option would have added only $12 to the bill. They were willing to sell it, though with reservations. But I did not want it anyway, partially because the fastest speed they could give me at my fairly remote house is 3mbps, which while actually quite reasonable for my needs, is dumb for housewide TV fed off of the internet.
I got my package with just phone, I was not going to do that, but the package options at the time actually would have had me paying $3 *more* a month to *not* have phone, which was counterintuitive.
I set myself up with free over the air Digital TV (DTV) house wide, so I pay nothing for it, though get comparatively few channels. I do have to replace my antenna, I have the replacement, but have not had the time to do the installation. Something happened to it, as I was getting some 28 channels clear, and a few more with issues, now get about half that. The new antenna is more powerful.
I am also on Hulu Free, Crackle, CrunchyRoll, and Rabbit TV, so use the internet connection for those services. Rabbit TV is interesting, since it uses a USB dongle, but only costs about $10 a year for the service, but $20 with the first year with the purchase of the device.
All in all combined for house unlimited Internet, unlimited Phone, and free TV, I pay under $75 even with me getting off the promo period and the rate increases.