Dialing for (fewer) dollars

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Proof that all you have to do sometimes is ask: I just knocked $700 off my annual phone bill. It took about two hours and required a little patience, but the result shows how cutting a few bucks out of your monthly budget doesn’t have to require eating tuna from dented cans.

Our monthly household phone bill –- just the landline, no broadband or wireless service -– has hovered around $130 for the past year. We need two lines for our home office, with long-distance and voice mail on both. The service was a bundle negotiated several years ago, when AT&T, our carrier, was still SBC. We hadn’t changed it since, even though every month’s bill tickled my brain with the thought that we probably could get a better deal.

That sentiment was echoed by our cable and broadband provider, Time Warner, which seems to stuff every bill with an offering for its low-cost smorgasbord of TV, phone and online access. So this week, I finally made the call to Time Warner and was told I could get a pre-tax rate of less than $50 for both lines, with all the same services. Nice. But then that got me thinking that maybe I could do better. So I called AT&T. There I was told the best I could manage would be a pre-tax bundle of $75.

The deal seemed clinched when the AT&T representative confessed that she, too, has home phone service bundled with her cable. (She said she lives in Massachusetts, outside AT&T’s local service area.)

Back I went to Time Warner, ready to sign up, but with a few questions. The first related to 911 service. I’d read horror stories about 911 calls that went wrong because callers weren’t using traditional landlines. As the father of two small boys –- and the veteran of a harrowing 911 experience involving one of them -– I wanted as few cracks in the emergency response as possible. The Time Warner representative satisfied enough of my concerns, but when we got down to brass tacks on pricing, the initial $47 price started to climb. An extra charge for voice mail. A fee to port the numbers over from AT&T. An installation charge for the second line.

Pretty soon, my potential annual savings were barely cracking the triple digits. Plus, there was still that lingering doubt about cutting Ma Bell’s apron strings.

Hello, AT&T, again. The first representative on this second call didn’t quite know what to do with me, opting to rattle off a bunch of offer codes and then put me on perpetual hold. Cue the music. Finally, an awesome customer retention representative came on the line and started pounding the numbers. Forget $75. How about $65? Oh, wait, why not $55? Plus, let’s knock about $35 off this month’s bill for being such a loyal customer.

Done.

All these prices, of course, are pre-tax and pre-surcharge. Taxes and surcharges tend to add about $20 a month to our bill. So I figure I’ll end up saving about $55 a month, plus the one-time $35 credit –- making my annual savings just shy of $700. I know I could cut even deeper if we were willing, say, to cut the landline completely and go wireless or switch to a VOIP service, but there’s still some comfort and security wrapped up in those copper wires that connect our house to the outside world.

-- Aaron Curtiss