But now, with no more special promotional pricing nor yearly contracts, when my current yearly contract expires in March 2007 it will cost me $19.99/mo for the same 1.5 DSL speed. If I want to accept a 50% speed cut, the price will be $14.99/mo. If I want to upgrade to 3.0 speed that will be $24.99/mo. Those are all reasonable possibilities for me, but I probably won't consider paying more for their new 6.0 speed. I read that although no yearly contract will be required, they'll give a bonus month to those who pay for a year in advance.
They probably figured the market correctly. I will probably stay with my 1.5 DSL speed and pay them $19.99/mo after March 2007. That is cheaper than the dialup ISPs such as AOL, Earthlink, etc. Almost everyone will probably do likewise. From what I read, despite some fears, the transition will be seamless. In other words I shouldn't have to do anything for this to happen automatically. (?)
The problem comes later when they decide that they have a monopoly again, and start jacking up the monthly price. My question is: How long do you think they'll stick with those new monthly rates before they start raising them? My optimistic guess would be 1-2 years. What's your guess?
AT&T DSL has usenet service (newsgroups) although you have to rummage around a little to find the info. I'm using their free nntp service at news.chi.sbcglobal.net which hopefully will continue. I don't use usenet much anymore because with the advantage of DSL speed, the internet forums are just about as fast and are becoming very diverse with the popular phpBB, proBoard, etc forum systems.
I'm not concerned that AT&T doesn't provide free webspace with their DSL plan. I've already made the switch to a satisfactory commercial web host for only $1.99/mo for my personal website, which I found through google searches. Their server space may be slightly oversold (aren't all hosts oversold?), because there are occasional temporary throughput and connection difficulties (who doesn't have occasional outages?). It's OK 99% of the time and for my limited purposes as a personal website. I've even put up a new phpBB forum using a MySQL database on my website without any increase in rate, but there will be increases if my forum becomes very active. phpBB forums are fairly bandwidth-hungry. In that case it might become cheaper to switch to a different web host with a different pricing structure. For those wishing to put up an ordinary personal website without much space or bandwidth requirement, maybe you'll want to take a look. The customer support is very good:
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