I read this article from Robert X. Cringely on the net neutrality debate that’s going on at the moment. What I liked about it is the emphasis he put on the services ISP’s are adding to the internet connection that only add to the price and aren’t selectable. Myself I need a reliable, fast enough, internet connection without any bells and whistles. I don’t care about ISP provided email addresses, webspace or spamfilters I take care of that myself and I guess you do too otherwise you wouldn’t be reading my blog.

The thing is with all those ISP provided services you might get too dependent on them. We all know how hard it is to switch to another email address. Having your own domain which you host yourself including mail is helping you to become an independent player. You don’t really need the ISP added services and you are free to switch to another ISP without many problems.

This makes it very easy to profit from the ever cheaper connection fees of broadband. To switch to another provider you need to wait till one or two months to end of your contract term (mostly a year) and start shopping around. Get that second phone-line, use it to connect the new ISP. When it is up and running transfer the DNS entries to the new IP address (this usually takes up to 24 hours to go through all DNS servers). After a day or two you can disconnect you old connection and terminate the contract.

I am possibly going to do this myself as my ISP has been bought by a large telco who is infamous for high connection fees. The details of the new contracts we are getting will be published in august, which means I still have time to decide. I’ve been looking around for alternatives that would provide a reliable connection without to many expensive services and found many. But reliability of an is something that is hard to find out so I have been lurking in newsgroups and forums of the ISP’s to see how many complaints there are on connectivity.