At WeaKnees, we hear from a lot of people who want to eliminate monthly fees. We’ve got cord-cutters getting all of their TV programming via OTA antenna and by streaming, and we’ve got people purchasing lifetime service for their TiVo DVRs to eliminate that monthly fee. We get it – lots of people don’t like a recurring charge on their credit card each month. On the flip side, companies absolutely LOVE these monthly fees – they know that we’re all too inertial to do anything about them most of the time.
Well, here’s a monthly fee you may be paying, and a way to remove it. It’s not a full bill, unfortunately, but it’ll take your cable internet bill down a bit. It’s the lease fee for your cable modem.
If you have TimeWarner, you might have seen that your monthly lease fee for your cable modem is going up by 50% – from $4 to $6. If not, here’s an article about it. In any event, there is a way to get rid of that fee entirely, and that is to buy your own modem.
That’s what some of us here at WeaKnees did. We’re in TimeWarner country, and when word trickled through the office that there was even a cable modem fee to begin with, most of us were surprised – we don’t examine these bills that often. And now, most of us don’t pay it.
The process is pretty simple. You buy your own cable modem, hook it up, call TimeWarner and tell them to activate it and deactivate the old one. Then, if you don’t have phone service with TimeWarner, you give them back their modem. (Oh – and if you do still have and want land-line phone service, we’re working on a way out of that, too.)
We all purchased the Motorola SURFBoard SB6121 which goes for about $70 on Amazon. So within one year, we’ll each save $2. The next year, $72 – assuming the cable company doesn’t hike the fee yet again.
Sure, it probably isn’t even one entire month’s worth of the bill for most people, but it’s something. And it’s a pretty painless process.