While companies rush to provide bigger, cheaper and more impressive bundles, research shows that consumer interest in such products has dropped considerably. This week has been filled with news of companies expanding their bundle offerings. Both Qwest and SBC announced they'd stuck deals with Echostar to provide satellite television in the hopes of luring customers away from cable. However even cable companies like Cablevision joined in the fun, hoping to provide more choices for consumers.

But a new survey from Solomon Wolff Associates shows that while companies are busy offering better bundles, that doesn't necessarily mean consumers are interested in them. In fact if the survey can be believed, interest among consumers in bundled services is estimated to have dropped more than 40 percent in the past three years.

The question would appear slightly suspect however; 6,400 consumers were asked if they would buy local, long-distance and wireless phone service, cable or satellite television and Internet access from the same company "for about the same price as they are paying now". A little less than half found the idea appealing. Though isn't the idea of bundling to reduce costs for services?

The bundling tactic often intentionally makes it difficult to determine if you're actually getting a deal or not. While some bargains offer a good bang for your buck, many analysts still recommend shopping around for separate communications needs, particularly long distance, in order to get the best bargains.

While providers often pitch bundles as cost saving and consumer friendly, critics of the plans charge that underneath the sales pitch, many of the plans offer questionable savings with numerous murky restrictions. "They're intentionally designed to be confusing to consumers in order to minimize the amount of price comparison," noted one analyst earlier this year. "If everybody offered a homogenous product, customers would always select the product with the lower prices," he says. "So firms have an incentive to not provide identical products."

But with the telcos losing to the cable industry in the broadband battle, giving what often is simply the illusion of a bargain could drive consumers one way or the other. With VDSL and fiber still too costly for broad-scale deployment of quality video services, throwing satellite service into the mix will be their attempt to offer more choices under the sometime illusionary guise of cost savings.