[bogomipz]

"With a telco acting as a utility, over the long term, there's little incentive to provide better service."

With a telco acting as part of an entrenched duopoly there is also no incentive for the provide better service or better pricing either.

[ryao]

You can get better pricing if you research how their pricing games work and then fight to win them. My Verizon bill is a fourth of what it used to be on the triple play and about half what it was when I killed the triple play and went Internet only from using the trick of going to the cable company and then returning for prewired new customer pricing.

Getting it without many of the tricks advertising uses to extract more money out of customers than the advertised pricing is a struggle though.