I am looking for an ISP at or around $40 a month. I don't need cable or phone so no bundling. I don't need state of the art super speeds just a reliable connection.
I have been using Earthlink which is actually contracted out through Time Warner and was paying $41.95/month which I was okay with. For whatever reason, after more then a year they started sneaking in a $5.99 a month "equipment lease fee" for the modem they provided so my bill has jumped up to $47.94.
The final straw came today. I had historically been paying my bill by logging in each month and making a "single payment" using my CC but sometimes I would forget to pay and the following month I'd just pay for the last month and current month. There was no fee or penalty for this but I decided to save myself the trouble and sign up for recurring bill payment (I like paying month to month so that I can make sure I'm only getting billed the correct amount---this is how I go about most things).
I gave them my CC information for recurring payments and it worked fine for the last two months. Then they snuck in the modem leasing fee out of the blue in February and at the beginning of April I had to cancel the recurring bill payment because my credit card company cancelled my card and reissued a new one due to the Target Fiasco (way to be proactive 5 months after the fact).
The moment I was issued a new card I updated the recurring bill payment information (this was April 7th). However on April 25th they still tried to bill the old CC, despite that payment method being cancelled and the new information being entered and I was charged a $25 fee for this.
After an hour on the phone I got them to waive the fee (their excuse was that it can take up to a month, or one billing cycle for the recurring payment information to update---and they had no answer as to how I could have done anything differently to avoid this fee)
Anyways I'm just frustrated with them at the moment. I can live with $47.xx although I think it's stupid that after almost two years of having their stupid stock modem I'm now being charged $5.99 a month to lease it. I just feel like I can do better then ~ $48 a month---my only hesitation is that I'm not sure if a new company would mean I'd end up with a new SSID which means I'd have to reprogram the difficult wireless devices like printers and I have two in use that are a headache to reset/reprogram
I have been using Earthlink which is actually contracted out through Time Warner and was paying $41.95/month which I was okay with. For whatever reason, after more then a year they started sneaking in a $5.99 a month "equipment lease fee" for the modem they provided so my bill has jumped up to $47.94.
The final straw came today. I had historically been paying my bill by logging in each month and making a "single payment" using my CC but sometimes I would forget to pay and the following month I'd just pay for the last month and current month. There was no fee or penalty for this but I decided to save myself the trouble and sign up for recurring bill payment (I like paying month to month so that I can make sure I'm only getting billed the correct amount---this is how I go about most things).
I gave them my CC information for recurring payments and it worked fine for the last two months. Then they snuck in the modem leasing fee out of the blue in February and at the beginning of April I had to cancel the recurring bill payment because my credit card company cancelled my card and reissued a new one due to the Target Fiasco (way to be proactive 5 months after the fact).
The moment I was issued a new card I updated the recurring bill payment information (this was April 7th). However on April 25th they still tried to bill the old CC, despite that payment method being cancelled and the new information being entered and I was charged a $25 fee for this.
After an hour on the phone I got them to waive the fee (their excuse was that it can take up to a month, or one billing cycle for the recurring payment information to update---and they had no answer as to how I could have done anything differently to avoid this fee)
Anyways I'm just frustrated with them at the moment. I can live with $47.xx although I think it's stupid that after almost two years of having their stupid stock modem I'm now being charged $5.99 a month to lease it. I just feel like I can do better then ~ $48 a month---my only hesitation is that I'm not sure if a new company would mean I'd end up with a new SSID which means I'd have to reprogram the difficult wireless devices like printers and I have two in use that are a headache to reset/reprogram