Starting July 1st, 2012, Comcast will be raising it’s rates in the Vancouver, WA area on it’s limited basic service cable plan. The limited basic service plan provides the channels 1 to 30.
The new price will be $16.50, which is a little more than a 9% increase over it’s current price of $15.07. The change in price will effect about 9,300 subscribers. Comcast already increased the prices of the larger packages earlier this year, so those won’t be changed (again) at this time.
“We are concerned (about) the timing of the rate increase given the current economic climate,” Demmon wrote in an email to local government officials and cable commission members. “However, this is a business decision by Comcast over which neither local nor federal government has any regulatory authority.”
Comcast has been increasing it’s prices by about 5% each year, however, the last price hike was in December 2010, so it looks as if this increase is to make up for 2011.
Although they expect the subscriber base to drop due to the new price hike, I wouldn’t expect it to drop by much. The last increase on the larger packages only resulted in a few hundred customers dropping the service (82,829 to 82,474) — about a 4% loss. So assuming the loss was the same, I would expect Comcast to lose 375 customers. That said, this is the most basic (and cheapest) package, and since there are fewer options at this price point, I don’t expect Comcast to lose nearly that many subscribers. I’d say maybe half that, or 185.