Comcast Caps?

I was reading the Mercury News this morning and saw an article about Comcast's plans to raise rates and cap downloads (250GB/month). Interesting, very interesting. I suppose this is in response to the FCC dinging Comcast for blocking BitTorrent downloads. Or is it.

Is it possible that it's an attempt on Comcast's part to get people to use its video-on-demand service and its IP telephone offering?

Think about it.. We use Skype for our long distance service - it can't be beat really. It costs $30 a year for unlimited domestic long distance, and about $0.021 per minute for calls to Europe. In contrast, Comcast's phone service clocks in at around $33/month (assuming the $99 "Triple Play"). But Skype uses bandwidth..

Moving along, we have video... We occasionally use Amazon's unbox service to download and watch movies. In the near future we might be moving to Netflix - via Roku or maybe some comparable device. We download SD videos now, they don't use a whole lot of bandwith. But should we start using something that does HD, we can probably expect about 4 - 5GB per hour. If we wanted to watch 2 hours of TV a day, we'd go exceed our cap every month. True, we would never watch that much TV, but I can imagine there are people out there who would.

So, Comcast, fess up. Are you really trying to police the Internet with this new policy, or are you just trying to incent people to pay you for the same services they can get elsewhere?

And speaking of television, I noticed a few digital converters for sale lately - they were usually $59.99 minus the $40 government coupon.  We don't need one, but I was thinking about getting one, just to screw the government out of $40.  Any other takers?