From what I hear from Americans here and there, Comcast is worse than Rogers (the company that has a monopoly here, who I give money to for cable, internet, etc.)
I pay $280 a month for internet, cable, and home phone. I only have home phone in there so that I could get the unlimited internet bundle. So.. yeah. I actually used to pay more, but I moved my cellphone to another company (and now pay a lot less) and got rid of 2 speciality (soccer) channels that were costing me $40 a month extra.
One day i will cut my cable, but.. I need my HD sports. Hockey and all the different soccer leagues and cups and competitions I like to watch. Streams are sucky, so.. here I am spending a fortune on cable each month.
Mind you my work pays me back for my internet. Every single $ I spend on internet I get back as cash at the end of the year. So that $280 should really be more like.. $180.
Internet bandwidth use is only ever going to increase. Data caps terrify me.
I've used 250gb in the past month and I only have a paltry 10mbps, less than 30% of the national average speed.
edit: One thing I'll say in defense of Comcast is that to say they have a 'monopoly' is not entirely true. I do not use Comcast for my television service, and I personally don't know anyone who does. Obviously they are stronger in certain geographical areas than others, but that does not constitute a monopoly.
So is Comcast the only company in the world doing this?How is it possible that caketrasty has never heard of internet monopolies?
The city gives them a charter for a monopoly to incentivize them to provide infrastructure for the town. A great, great many towns have this kind of deal set up, which is one of the reasons Google Fiber can't be rolled out everywhere. The city council says no, either because they are corrupt to existing ISPs or because they already have a contractual obligation to them to prevent competition (because they're corrupt).
Take the “triple-play” packages—cable, phone, and high-speed Internet access—that tens of millions of Americans buy from companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable. In France, a country often portrayed as an economic and technological laggard, the monthly cost of these packages is roughly forty dollars a month—about a quarter of what we Americans pay. And, unlike in the United States, France’s triple-play packages include free telephone calls to anywhere in the world. Moreover, the French get faster Internet service: ten times faster for downloading information, and twenty times faster for uploading it.
In Seoul, triple-play packages start at about fifteen dollars a month—yes, fifteen. In Zurich, otherwise a pretty expensive place to live, they start at thirty dollars. When it comes to stand-alone services, it’s a similar story. In Britain, for example, monthly cell-phone charges start at about fifteen dollars; unlimited broadband starts at about twenty-five dollars a month.