Cheap DSL, Cleverly Obscured....Until Now

Back in early January, I mentioned the $20/month ‘naked DSL’ concession that AT&T proposed to the FCC in order to move forward the approval process for its ultimately successful acquisition of BellSouth. That deal will go into effect within the next six months (i.e. by year-end) but nearer-term AT&T was also required to offer another concession; $10/month basic DSL bundled with phone service. Predictably, AT&T ‘buried’ the offer on its website but now, courtesy of The Consumerist, I pass the link on to you.

It’s essentially AT&T’s ‘Basic DSL’ package, at a $5/month discount, potentially minus some of the ‘extras’ such as unlimited online photo storage and supplemental email addresses (the overview page linked to in the previous paragraph doesn’t clarify). I wish I would have known about this deal when I recently signed up for DSL at our weekend abode, although the ‘up to 128 kbps’ upload speeds might not have delivered enough upstream bandwidth for a stable VoIP experience (which is why we ended up going with the $19.99 ‘Express DSL’ package and its ‘up to 384 Kbps’ upstream speeds).