A few years ago, it was common to buy your phone service from a phone company, your Internet connection from an ISP, and your cable TV from a cable company. Sometimes all these services used the same connection, but more often they didn't.

Recently, however, the phone, Internet and cable companies have realised that they could all become much more profitable by offering all the different services on one line, for one price - they call it 'triple play'. Much like being able to get electricity and gas from the same provider, this has been caused by deregulation, but it's nothing to be afraid of - in fact, it's often a great way to save money.

How it works is this: you agree to let one company run your line (either phone or cable), and give you all three services over it. In return, they typically give you some kind of discount, such as free Internet service when you buy the best phone package, or more TV channels for people with the fastest Internet connections. Not only does this save you money, but it also saves you the inconvenience of having to keep track of and pay multiple bills.

However, before you enter into any such agreement, you should be careful to read up carefully on whichever company you're going with and make sure that you can trust them. It's terrible to end up owing large amounts of money to a company with bad customer service.

At this point, the future is widely seen to be extending the service to the amusingly-named 'four play'. The first company in the world to offer this is France Telecom, under the Orange mobile phone brand, and it has already started rebranding the various ISPs it owns to use the Orange name. In the future, all your communication services could be on just one bill - which bodes well for the surely-coming-soon adoption of mobile Internet, doesn't it?