Remember the time I got DSL a year ago? I got it at Verizon’s promo rate of $29/month for the first year, with the first month free. It sounded pretty good at the time — until their $14.95/month promo rate was introduced a month later, at which point I was locked into the prior deal for a year. I know it’s been a year because I got two renewal notices last week, one by mail, urging me to renew at the continued promo rate of $29/month; and another one by email, urging me to do the same for $14.95/month. Both were quite insistent that I do so before the regular rate of $37/month kicked in on the May deadline date.

I called Verizon and, after a surprisingly short wait on hold, asked the sales rep which rate I should be getting. It turns out that the $29 plan is for a 3.0 Mbps download speed, while the $14.95 plan is for 768 kbps. I really don’t need 3.0 Mbps of throughput, so I asked to be downgraded to the cheaper deal on renewal. They complied quickly and without any fuss. So, here I am, paying half of what I’ve been paying for DSL, at a speed of less than 1/4 what I used to be at, and I feel no discernible difference, as I rarely engage in high-bandwidth activities like BitTorrent and viewing of excessively long movies.

(The extra $15 per month I now have from the downgrade will go into my “Get the Star Trek Original Series DVD Set” piggy bank — which, I now admit, actually serves to offset the cost, as I just won a secondhand ST:TOS DVD set on an impulse eBay auction.)