“Konkurrenz belebt das Geschaeft” is an old german saying (roughly translates to: competition is good for trade), which seems to be so true in the current online- and phone-market. We’ve had our phonelines and dsl-setup from the biggest german provider (Telekom (T-Com + T-Online)) forever, but it seems it’s time to move on. We were paying a nifty amount of 74,19€ basic charge for a ISDN-connection (two digital lines), dsl-setup with 768kbit down, 128kbit up and a flatrate. As they’re changing their port-setup you’re forced to upgrade to 1MBit down, 128kbit up on January 1st 2005 - as this is an auto-upgrade there’s nothing you can do about it, apart from moving on or paying 4 €/month more for this “speed increase”. This would bring up our basic charge to 78,19€ which equals 106,10$. :brickwall:

As I think this is ridiculously high for the provided service I told my folks that we should look around for alternatives. As I’m the geek of the family I did the checking and came up with different solutions.

• Leave ISDN-connection with Telekom and switch online stuff to cable. This would have cut the online-costs to 39€/month (Telekom: 16,99€ + 29,99€ flat = 46,98€) - an improvement, but not quite the cut I had hoped for. :tdown:
• Switch complete connection (ISDN + DSL) to the competition. In this case to the second largest phone provider (Arcor)…and bingo. Just made the switch (just waiting for the paper work being sent our way and we’re gone - see more details below) :tup:

The Arcor deal is quite sweet:

• ISDN just like with Telekom. They’re handling all the switches and legal stuff (canceling the old commitment to Telekom, switching over all our MSNs, etc)
• They’re offering both a DSL-flat and a phone-flat (all calls are free, except for calls to mobile phones).
• The DSL basic charge and the flatrate are way cheaper.

Cost factor:

• ISDN basic charge: 19,95€
• DSL basic charge: 10€
• DSL-flat: 9,95€
• phone-flat: 19,95€
• upgrade DSL to 2MBit (2MBit down, 192kbit up): 5€
• Grand total: 64,85€ (equals 88$)

Now that looks more like it. We’re saving around 14€/month, but wait, that’s the absolute minimum as we’ve got a phone-flat now, which we didn’t have with Telekom, so it’s gonna be even more, month after month after month (we had one invoice of less than 100€ in the whole year 2004) - and I’ve got double bandwith as soon as the switch is made :mrgreen: