Surely there has to be a catch somewhere...?

I walked to the PO Box as usual this morning, to collect our mail. Included amongst the envelopes was our bill for CYTA, who provide our phone and Internet services.

With the bill was a letter, as usual Greek on one side and English on the other. In my experience, this usually indicates increased prices, or something of the sort

But no! It says:

From 1 December 2008, Cyta will double the download speeds and, at the same time, increase the upload speeds of all its existing DSL Access Home products.

There's a handy chart, too, showing how each type of service will be automatically upgraded to the next one up. We currently have the Home1000 service, which - at least in theory - means we should be getting a download speed of 1024 kbps. Not that we often get that, but we're supposed to. From 1st December, it will double to 2048.

So that's the good news.

Even better - and even more surprising - is that when this happens, the prices will reduce! Our current system costs us €29.47 per month including VAT. Which isn't particularly cheap, when compared to UK broadband, but is still considerably less than we paid for our phone bills years ago when we were on dial-up access. However, from December 1st, we will apparently be paying €25.30.

It's hard to believe that there isn't a catch somewhere, but this IS Cyprus, and strange things happen sometimes.

Perhaps CYTA made too much profit last year. Or perhaps they're trying to woo customers back from the other phone and Internet service providers. Whatever the reason, it was a pleasant surprise to find mixed up with the bills.