As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and the special “loyal customer” discount I’ve been getting on my broadband service – over which my Phone.com VoIP is carried – has ended.

Century Link had been charging me what I admit is a rock-bottom $20 a month for 12 Mb/s service, with a modest upload speed of less than 1 Mb/s. Suddenly, the company wants to more than double that, to $50 a month. Alternately, for another $10 a month, I can jump to 20 Mb/s a month service (which by my math is $720 a year).

But what’s a guy to do? The only competition at this point is Comcast. Now the cable company is offering me 20 Mb/s for just $30 a month for the first six months, jumping to $45 for another six, and then to $63 after that (in other words, $756 per year). Now obviously, counting on my fingers, that means I’d be paying Comcast $450 the first year, which sounds good except for the little asterisk that says “plus equipment, installation, and taxes.” And finding out how much that will be in advance is like pulling teeth from a duck.

I have a feeling that many of my readers are facing the same quandary, and from conversations with a lot of people, I find that they’re taking double, triple or even quadruple play packages because of what’s become a fairly outrageous price for those who buy just one service from one of these giant companies. Indeed large corporations, which buy enough bandwidth to dictate their own terms, don’t face that kind of pressure, but small businesses and residential users certainly do.

Now I should explain that I have no real interest in paying for TV shows, so out go the deals that include cable or satellite TV. (It’s not that I’m anti-TV. I have a home theatre, get dozens of digital channels over the air, have lots of Blue Ray and DVD discs (and even some old VHS tapes plus a player), and watch stuff over the Internet regularly from several different sources.)

And I have no interest in a landline telephone. Gosh, that’s why I use Phone.com! So there goes that bundle opportunity. And although the competing broadband providers would love to see me sign up for their VoIP services, the simple fact is that, for the price, Phone.com offers far more features and flexibility for a small- to medium-size user at a far more attractive price.

As for throwing in a cell phone, I simply don’t use the right mobile carrier for such a bundle here in Denver (and I do have one of the latest 4G LTE phones, by the way).

So there go all the discount bundles.

Ah, what to do … if anyone has a suggestion, please send it my way …

Sunday is Mother’s Day, and like good sons all over America I shelled out for the delivery of a nice bunch of flowers. In truth, I’d of course rather if I could have delivered the flowers in person, but the airfare from where I am in Denver to where my mom is in Florida is a little more than four times the cost of the flowers.

Please don’t call me cheap … there’s also car rental to consider. And of course, there’s the cost of a nice dinner at a nice restaurant, although of course I’ll probably spend most of that on dinner with the wife.

But there isn’t the cost of an hour or more on the phone … something that once upon a time would have cost even more than the flowers. Indeed in the distant past it would have rivaled the cost of the airfare. Nowadays, of course, there is no additional cost for the long distance call, at least not for subscribers to Phone.com and many other VoIP providers. (If you’re still paying for long distance by the minute, shame on you.)

Come to think of it … my mother uses the Internet, even though she’s in her 90s. And her phone is carried over a VoIP service. But for lots of other folks … bet your mother and father still have traditional phone service.

So how’s this for a Mother’s Day present that will last far longer than flowers. If your parents have DSL or Cable Internet, but still use dial-up phone service, get them VoIP. With a company such as Phone.com, with the first month free, the total cost for a quarter of a year will be less than I just paid FTD for the flowers.

And of course after that the savings will keep piling up, especially if Mom (and Dad) call you more often now, since it won’t cost anything extra no matter where you are in the United States (or even overseas in a long list of countries, if Phone.com is your carrier).

My younger son is in the middle of studies to become a network administrator, so of course he couldn’t resist monkeying around with his own private home network. It is a small affair with just a handful of devices – a PC, tablet, cell phone or two and, of course, a Phone.com analog telephone adapter (ATA).

And with that he managed to prove that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. He just couldn’t resist accessing the ATA, but he hasn’t quite learned enough yet (he’s in the middle of the course) to solve every network-related problem, even those he’s created himself.

Put another way, his phone doesn’t work any more.

For the tekkies among us: He accessed the ATA over the network and started playing around with some of the settings, in part to see how they work. The most critical one turned out to be the ATA’s IP address on the local area network. For various reasons, he decided to give all the devices on his network static IP addresses. He found the place on the ATA to set a static IP, even changed the setting to static IP, but forgot to enter the address before he pushed ‘enter.’ Thus, the network can’t find the ATA so he can’t get back into the ATA to restore the settings and, of course, he has no home phone service.

Oops.

To go into more detail, I have what qualifies as a small office phone system, but my “office” extends to family members, some of whom live overseas, and includes virtual numbers, plus cell phones and laptops set up as extensions. That includes my son, who gets his International phone service via his Phone.com extension.

To make a long story short … here comes Phone.com’s excellent customer service to the rescue.

In what was a matter of not very many minutes I had the answer to my son’s dilemma. Indeed, it turned out to be a very simple procedure to rescue his ATA. I won’t go into all the details, because I don’t want to tempt any of my readers into trying their own experiments and then begging for help, but in brief it involved connecting the ATA directly to a PC, rather than plugging it into a network router.

This story also illustrates that when choosing a VoIP carrier, the availability and quality of support is just as important as the monthly price. And from experience I know that Phone.com support is available 24×7 (and I know that’s real from having needed help at weird hours around midnight) by phone, live chat or by eMail.