Orange County Register

I spotted this a few days ago and am finally remembering to mention it: Verizon is giving away 6 months of DSL Internet service for free, with several catches of course.

But if you compare this promotion to AT&T’s current one that offers a $10/monthly discount, you wind up paying about the same price for either service: $120 for 12 months.

Verizon’s catchy campaign pushes the free factor in that if you sign up for one year, you’ll get six months of free DSL.

The catch: You have to be a current Verizon home-phone customer (current DSL customers not eligible), you must commit to one year (at a minimum of $19.99 a month for remaining 6 months), there’s a one-time $19.99 shipping and activation fee, and it’ll cost $79 if you cancel the service before the year ends. Oh, and after you subscribe for a year, the monthly fee could go up. And one other thing: the service is slow (for most of us) at up to 768 kbps download speeds and 128 kbps upload. For $10 more per month, Internet speeds quadruple to 3 mbps plus you’ll get a free router so you can share the Internet with multiple computers.

By comparison, AT&T’s basic DSL service is now $19.95 per month and offers similar speeds (768 kbps down, 384 kbps up). There’s no annual commitment and you don’t need AT&T’s home phone service. However, if you do commit to one year and have AT&T home phone service, you’ll get a $10 monthly discount, which brings the price for a year to $120 or the same price as Verizon’s above offer. The caveat to either AT&T plan: You’ll need to spend $50 to $80 on a modem.

(But one really nice bonus AT&T offers to subscribers is free access to Wi-Fi at AT&T hotspots at Starbucks.)

$10 a month is pretty good for DSL, especially if you’re paying that much for dial up. I know you dialers are still out there. I just checked the stats for OCRegister.com and noticed that about 3.8 percent of our visitors last month approached by modem. Wow.

Related:

• There Is No Broadband ‘Price War’ (DSL Reports)
• Verizon Offers Free DSL for up to Six Months (PC World)
• Verizon Looks To Grow DSL By Giving It Away (Multichannel News)

Past deals on Gadgetress:

• My own list of free tech stuff online
• Avoid overdraft fees with free mobile-phone service
• Make your Facebook profile scream with free tool
• Test a $700 switch from D-Link for free
• Stump the PC Club: Organize DVDs, media with free database software
• Best of free iPhone Apps plus contests
• Did AT&T yank free Wi-Fi for iPhone users?
• Bank offers free anti-phishing software

Have you been too busy to catch all the Orange County business news? Here’s our cheat sheet on some of the most intriguing stories of last week:

• Is that a cell phone in your TV? Broadcom hopes so
• Demand to buy O.C. homes doubles in a year
• Doctors propose more work on Hillary Clinton’s 60-year-old face
• Poll: How’s the new 714 phone dialing going?
• SoCal leading indicator slides below 2004 level
• California ranks 2nd in mortgage fraud

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