Internet Price Hike

I'm not sure if you remember back to last year when our internet bill was going to increase?

Knowing that our discount was going away, I ended up changing our plan and locking us into a rate lock for 2 years. All this took place in February of last year, 2013.

I signed up for the rate lock to prevent any immediate price hikes and to keep our bill around $30 a month...

Well lo and behold I opened my statement this month and found our bill had jumped to $47.99

That's a 41% increase and I have no idea why.

I looked on an old statement (since we still need a shredder), and noticed that our price protection had been dropped.

It was supposed to be good for 2 years and now its gone...

So I called...

Apparently in November when we upgraded our internet, we were locked into a "promotional" price... and the promo price for the internet upgrade has expired.

Apparently we still have price protection, but the discount is gone.

While I was on the phone with the rep, without my asking he offered to give us a new promo rate that's $5 a month cheaper.

So our bill will now be $42.99 a month instead of $33.99, for a percentage increase of 26.5%

Why are internet fees allowed to go up more than the cost of inflation?

Lowering our internet bill

Normally I don't open my monthly cox statement. It's one of the few bills that actually comes in the mail because I can't seem to get their website to let me view my bill online successfully. We have auto pay and I normally just acknowledge it's arrival by handing it to my husband for his "shred" pile...

But this past month I opened the notice because I knew it had been almost a year since Cox had graciously given us a  "temporarily" rate reduction because SCB wasn't working. If you remember last year, I called them up to drop our internet speed to something slower to save money when they were increasing the fees and instead they offered us a discount to keep our current plan so we leaped on it.

So, I opened the bill and I was glad I read the fine print! 

They scheduled a rate increase not only to remove our "unemployed" discount-- but one that would be across the board for all cox subscribers.

Each month we used to pay a total of $35.14 for internet and for a cox service protection plan with our discount. If I hadn't opened that bill, the next time we would have been charged we would have been paying $49.98 ...

a 42% increase.

Ya, you read that right. Our bill would have been 42% more because our service plan would have gone from $31.19 to $43.99 and the cox service protection plan from $3.95 to $5.99 a month.

So I called cox and asked them to take us out of "Internet Essential" and drop us into the first tier of internet they offer. Essentially we went one level lower than that what we currently had. Then I had them remove our cox protection plan policy... and then I had them lock us into a 2 year contract at our current price to prevent any future price increases from coming and spiking up our bill since they seem to come around every year.

If we cancel them before 2 years, we get hit with a $45 fee, which goes down each month you have the service. I figure if this rate hike alone was $15 the next will be higher and since we aren't moving or canceling our cox for 2 years, we will be okay having a contract.

So our bill should be around $30 even each month, so not only did we not have to eat the increase, we ended up saving around $5 a month from our service bill.

:)