Comcast speed & price increases in pipeline

Comcast employees apparently didn't get the Apple Computer Zip-it training, because they're talking about new speed tiers and pricing to rollout in several markets over the next few weeks.

Employees dishing to DSLReports say the 6 Mbps/1 Mbps (download/upload rates) subscribers who pay $42.95 per month will get double the speed to 12 Mbps/2 Mbps, while customers currently getting 8 Mbps/2Mbps at $52.95 per month will soon get 16 Mbps/2 Mbps. There will be no cost for the FiOS-competitive upgrades, and Comcast is keeping their $24.95/month economy 768Kbps/384kbps service.

DOCSIS 3.0-based packages will offer 22 Mbps/5 Mbps service for $62.95 - and speed might get up to 30 Mbps when Comcast's Powerboost technology is added into the equation, say sources. At the top of the mountain is a 50 Mbps/10 Mbps package that could come in as low as $135.95 per month. The so-called "Extreme 50" package may also bundle into a customer's existing services for $100 more a month.

"For the time being," all tiers also come with Comcast's 250GB monthly bandwidth cap. They will also be subject to the company's bandwidth management system that temporarily puts heavy users into a slower QoS if the local node is seeing congestion or if the users are taking up more than 70 percent of their allotted throughput.

Comcast should have a new website for the faster speeds within the next few weeks. Users can do the standard zip code query to see if their neighborhood has been upgraded to DOCSIS 3.0. Comcast says it will upgrade 20 percent of its footprint to 3.0 by the end of the year and 100 percent of its markets by the end of 2010.

For more:
- DSLReports reports [1] on new Comcast speeds, prices