response 129 of 290:

Feb 1 05:43 UTC 2006

In general cell phone plans tend to be priced around a "sweet spot" in the
neighborhood of $40-50/mo; there exist plans that go for less than that
but usually they have lousy value (e.g. for $20 you get 60 minutes, but
for $40 you get 1500.)  Providers aren't particularly interested in
competing for the highly-frugal demographic; I think they either don't
care about it or figure that they should go prepaid.

I ended up removing the ground loop isolator from my cable; not only did it
allow analog leakage from OTA but it also did not cleanly pass some of the
digital channels recently introduced as part of digital simulcast.  So, at
least for the moment, I lifted the ground on my amplifiers and found that
to be the only workable short-term solution until I can find a better one.
But at least now all of my channels are better quality than I could get 
via DBS.