Roiling change in the telco market is throwing up some attractive-looking deals. Orcon and Vodafone/ihug are offering a year's free broadband if you sign a 12-month contract for their new landline phone services. And Telecom is offering a year's free mobile connection if you stay with is landline service.

The small print isn't quite so attractive. Vodafone and Orcon cap their free broadband at a modest 1GB (how Mr Brown laughs), and Telecom's "free" mobile plan is, in reality, a $30 credit on your mobile account - and then only if you upgrade your homeline account to one of its Anytime Plans (which cost $20 to $40 a month for a set number of minutes, after which you pay by the minute for calls. Details here).

But anyhow, as local loop unbundling and naked DSL really kick in, the war for your custom will grow considerably more fierce - and there could well come a point when you do want to switch providers for financial reasons (yes, there is another motivation beyond Bubble rage).

The game will be helped along by another welcome regulatory change: number portability (introduced on April 1, it means being able to take your Telecom phone number with when you switch to Vodafone or Orcon or whoever, or vice versa).

Or will it? One school of thought is that people won't be that inclined to change, because changing telco (or ISP) these days involves your email address too - and there's no such thing as email address portability. In Japan, for example, number portability was introduced last year, but takers were in single digits.

Aside from moving Gmail or similar, one solution is to get a personalised domain name. Then you're free to hop around different telcos/ISPs without any need to change your address (the price of independence: from around $60 a year, see Domainz.net or one of the internationals like Register.com - where I live).

I've been using a custom domain name for my personal email for a year or so. Yes, there is a little bit of hassle involved in letting everybody know. But it's the people who don't know that are the real joy: spam and unwanted hangers on disappeared from my inbox. The clean break was -and still is - joyous.