Qwest ran a similar trial for $1.00 bill pay online, I called and switched back to paper bill rather than e-bills and sent them checks for several months, it was changd back fairly quickly, I think they just trying to pad the profit. Way cheaper to have online bill pay rather than processing checks.
I wonder if you could fool your bank's online bill-pay to mistake them for a non-electronic payee. Perhaps, instead of selecting the carrier from the bank's list of known payees, you could just enter their name and the address to which snail-mail payments are to be sent (as if they were the local plumber instead of a big corporation). That way, you just fill in the amount and click Make Payment, but they get a paper check in the mail that costs just as much to process as if you had written a check and licked a stamp.