[AmonAmarth]

Crap. I canceled Cable 2 years ago and I have 20 over the air channels, Netflix, and Hulu. $16.00 a month, everything the family likes to watch. Now the price will be going up, big time.

[Uncle Ike]

Hey, all of you “Internet-over-Cable” snobs - my poky old DSL streams everything just fine - and the price hasn’t changed in years.....

Watching HULU (Free) as I type this... ;)

[the invisib1e hand]

kill the tv. you’ll all be better off.

[TexasFreeper2009]

dont even know who comcast is and don’t care, it wont affect me or my ability to stream over my AT&T dsl.

[Dr. Sivana]

Ha ha. I have heard this all before. There are enough outlets now, that unlimited plans will expand, NOT contract. I remember AOL resisting unlimited dial-up hours. I also remember paying by the minute for Compuserve and Delphi.

Comcast can do what it wants. The DSL providers and others will provide the bandwidth over time to win customers. The cable companies always treat broadband like the unwanted step-child anyway. Until they learn, they will pay, by losing customers.

[WackySam]

Comcast’s plans to do away with its 250 GB data cap and charge users based upon usage marks the end of an era for cable TV providers COMCAST

[Myrddin]

I've always had some kind of data cap. As a consequence, I never initiated an interest in streaming movies or other video content as a source of continuous entertainment. The occasional brief YouTube video gets some attention. I won't notice a bit.

[icwhatudo]

Just took a look at my comcast account. I ditched cable tv and now watch everything thru the internet. I was over 370GB in February, 260 in March, and 202 in April. Moving the max to 300GB will help me avoid more nastygrams.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Now the price will be going up, big time.

Maybe. 250 GB is a lot of Netflix and Hulu viewing. Charging by usage is a lot more fair, anyway - in theory. Internet users who use 10 or 20 GB a month should get much lower Comcast bills under the new pricing structure but probably won't - Comcast will probably make the old base rate the new minimum rate and charge upward from there based on usage.

Note that Comcast will not charge beyond the service minimum if customers stick exclusively with Comcast's own Xfinity streaming service - those customers will never be charged extra, no matter how much bandwidth they use as long as the bandwidth is spent on Comcast's own service. Pretty much like the power company not charging us beyond the service minimum as long as we buy all of our appliances from the power company. That was what the Net Neutrality issue was about, though it was pretty much lost in a lot of misconceptions.

[tennmountainman]

The real issue is for local communities to quit giving Comcast monopolies on running cable and internet to every house. These communities need to allow other companies to compete with Comcast. Other companies who want to compete should be allowed to run their own lines, not buy wholesale off Comcasts lines.

[vetvetdoug]

Comcast employees are the #1 donors to the Obama campaign. Comcast’s CEO is the weekly golfing partner of Obama. Comcast can shove anything they want down the consumer’s throat and don’t have a worry with the current DOJ. I canceled Comcast back six months ago and haven’t looked back.

[Pontiac]

HD TV Ping

[The Duke]

I have no problem with the notion of paying for that which I consume - as long as market competition is protected.

[MV=PY]

Free market to the rescue!

[richmwill]

Going over 200 GB requires a lot of watching. I have a Roku box and a PS3 connected online, watch a lot of Netflix movies and MLB.TV games, and the most I’ve ever gone to in a month was 55 GB.

[max americana]

So? I download thru the torrents every week.

[clearcarbon]

"Comcast, of course, says that its new, usage-based pricing policy is pro-consumer, and to a certain extent it is. The average broadband subscriber — those who only use up about 8 GB or 10 GB of data a month — shouldn’t necessarily pay the same as those whose usage goes above 300 GB in the same period of time."

Somehow I don't think those 8Gb to 10Gb users are going to be getting a discount.

[nathanbedford]

ping

[packrat35]

This is the reason I never signed up for streaming videos from Netflix. I still get 4 DVD’s at a time and I don’t have to worry about this crap.

[Nahanni]

The cost will only go up if you have Comcast.

I would not have Comcast as an interent provider even if they gave it to me for free. They suck, period. I do not know of anyone who has Comcast who does not have persistant problems with their service-loss of conectivity and outages-some of those events you can almost set a clock to. Way back in the good ol’ days when I played in a raiding guild on EverQuest when we would be raiding we would always take a break during the raid at about 7:15pm because we all knew that more likely then not the 14 people in the raid that were using Comcast would get lose their internet connections and go link dead. it was funny because these people all lived in different states and they woould all go link dead within 2 minutes of each other.

I once had Time-Warner and they sucked, too but that was before they passed the law that said that apartment complex owners could not ban you from having a satellite dish. I had no alternative to Time Warner before that because the county government gave Time Warner a monopoly. Once that law passed I dumped Time-Warner like a hot potato.

The thing that Comcast tends to forget is that there is no government mandated monopoly on interent providers as there is for cable companies. I would imagine that as soon as they do this their subscriber numbers are going to fall off a cliff.

I never used either Time Warner or Comcast as an internet provider. I have had ATT DSL and now have Uverse. In the last 14 years I have had sum total of 3 problems with connectivity. Three. Only one of those outages lasted over two hours, my Uverse modem bit the dust and I got a new one shipped to me by ATT which arrived the next day.

[TheBattman]

I canceled Cable 2 years ago and I have 20 over the air channels, Netflix, and Hulu. $16.00 a month, everything the family likes to watch. Now the price will be going up, big time.

You represent one of the big reasons for this move by Comcast. I know quite a few folks who have gone that direction - internet only (use VoIP for phone service as well). There is more money in cable TV service than just the internet. If customers cancel their TV service - they "have" to make that up somewhere...

Kind of reminds me of how the cellular companies have moved away from "unlimited" data plans, and even those who still have them (like me - grandfathered in) see throttling of the so-called "unlimited" data after 3GB of data is used in a billing cycle. I'm curious how this fits the name of "unlimited".