The price hikes include $5.70 per month for the Digital Classic package, and $3.70 for standard cable service.

The increases are necessary because Comcast is hurt by the economy, too, spokesman Jeff Alexander said.

He cited gas prices, health care costs, increased programming costs, and improvements in the company’s technology and service.

As reader Carl noted when passing the news along, Comcast may have set a bad precedent for other service providers to follow. Can we expect companies to start charging higher monthly fees, and point the finger at the poorly performing economy?

Post from: The Gadget Blog

As Comcast says:

250 GB/month is an extremely large amount of data, much more than a typical residential customer uses on a monthly basis. Currently, the median monthly data usage by our residential customers is approximately 2 – 3 GB. To put 250 GB of monthly usage in perspective, a customer would have to do any one of the following:

• Send 50 million emails (at 0.05 KB/email)
• Download 62,500 songs (at 4 MB/song)
• Download 125 standard-definition movies (at 2 GB/movie)
• Upload 25,000 hi-resolution digital photos (at 10 MB/photo)

Don’t want to follow the rules? Expect a pleasant call from Comcast asking you to curb your “excessive use”. Continued violation will of course result in the suspension or even termination of your account.

Man, now how are we supposed to download all those torrent movies for our piracy empire? Seriously though, 250GB a month is a lot of data (or 8 and-a-third gigs a day). Unless you need to download the entire capacity of a typical laptop hard drive.

You can still commit lots of copyright infringements with this allocation, so it’s clear that Comcast is doing this to preserve the quality of the service, and not out of pressure from those big copyright owners. After all, everyone has the right to free and prompt access to porn, free from even more bandwidth-hungry apps like Bittorrent and Filesharing.

Post from: The Gadget Blog