Downgrading Internet Service

Last month my annual contract with the telephone company's DSL internet service expired so they started billing me a slightly higher monthly rate. However they had three different annual contract options being offered to new subscribers: $19.99 a month for 1 megabit per second (mbps) download speed, $29.99 for 3 megabits per second which I currently had, or $42.99 for 7.1 megabits per second. Being an old subscriber normally disqualifies you from the new promotional offers, but having gone through a similar process last year when I upgraded from 768 kilobits per second to 3 megabits per second, I knew what to do. When you call the phone company's regular customer service people, they won't be able to help you avail of the new promotions. They have a different department called the “solutions department” where they can resolve special problems. Last year I was passed from one department to another before they were able to help me. This time I knew whom and what to ask for. In this case as well as last years', the solution is to retain a customer and the telephone company was able to help me faster this time without me feeling like a shuttlecock being batted around back and forth across the net. For my new annual contract, I opted to downgrade my internet speed to 1 mbps, two thirds slower than what I've been used to in the past year. It was initially discouraging to see the slowdown of my download speed, but bit by bit (pun intended) my patience is beginning to adjust to it. It used to take about 35 minutes to download a 700 megabyte public domain movie. Now it takes about an hour and 45 minutes at full speed. Streaming videos from Hulu.com and TV shows from ABC.com and Fox On Demand can get choppy or pixelated at times. But in this economy, some sacrifice is warranted and every little bit of savings helps.