Every six months I am required to play a little game with Charter Communications. They offer me a special promotional price on my internet and cable TV that lasts for 6 months. At the end of the 6 months, I call back and renew the promotion. Obviously they expect me to forget but I just set a Google Calendar reminder a day before it expires and poof; new promotion. It’s pretty stupid but I’ve been doing it for many years. For my participation in this little dance, I get internet and basic analog cable for $44.98–which is cheaper than just internet alone. Otherwise I would just cancel cable TV altogether… which I would gladly do; HD over the air is great and more than I need.

Our little requisite dance also gives them the opportunity to try and up-sell me on their phone service… with the ridiculous notion that if somehow I spend more money on their crap, I will save more money. Whatever. But my question is: are they completely stupid or some of their customer are. Probably a bit of both.

Long story only slightly longer… if you want cheaper internet and could give a crap about cable TV, this is the way to go and only requires about 4 minutes of your life biannually.

UPDATE: I received an email in response to this post from a manager at Charter (Eric K.). He informed me that Charter now offers an internet only, 2 year contract for $29.99. As I explained to Eric, I’m not a fan of contracts or companies that use them as they’re an obvious sign of poor business practices. That said, I would also prefer to just pay a fair price for internet and lose the cable TV altogether (free, over-the-air HD is more than enough TV for me).

So I’ve signed up for this contracted $29.99/mo internet-only service and canceled TV (though it did take two calls to make it happen; the first agent stating (incorrectly) that I needed a TV service to get the deal). Maybe in the future they’ll lose the contracts and promotions and whatnot… we’ll see. For now, my dance card is full for two years.