Comcast is taking its well-known reputation for being loathed in the cable business to the world of theme parks, where a trip to Comcast-owned Universal Studios Hollywood will now cost visitors 21% more for a walk-up one-day pass.

The cable operator believes it has left your money on the table, under charging for visits to the popular tourist destination. It has corrected that with the introduction of “on-demand pricing,” just a few weeks before the April 7 opening of its new Harry Potter attractions.

Steve Burke, who runs Comcast’s theme park and entertainment divisions, realized Comcast has “underestimated the theme parks business.” So it has raised prices… a lot, just in time for the arrival of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, featuring a giant castle, magic wand shops and a simulated ride on a broomstick that has caused even seasoned employees at the park to retch.

Also likely to turn stomachs is the new $115 per adult one-day pass price. One theme park designer told Bloomberg News he anticipated Harry Potter-related attractions will bring at least one million new visitors to the park, which will deliver a handsome $115 million to Comcast’s coffers.

Those looking for a less expensive ticket will need to plan well ahead and visit when park attendance is at its lowest, typically on weekdays. The new “on-demand pricing” means visitors will buy tickets like airline seats. Monday-Friday visits in April will cost $95, according to the website. Advance purchases of tickets good only on a specified Saturday or Sunday cost $105. If you don’t want to wait in line, you can buy “front of the line” passes for $179-239 per person. The $115 ticket is what visitors will get when they don’t buy tickets in advance.

But Comcast stands ready to collect even more from your visit, from food and beverage sales to ubiquitous Harry Potter merchandise. An “interactive wand” will set you back $48, a Hogwarts-approved tie costs $32, and a wizarding robe will make your pocketbook disappear at $110 each.

Comcast isn’t the only theme park owner in a hurry to raise rates. Variable pricing has also taken hold at Walt Disney theme parks. Ticket price inflation is already putting a strain on many visitors’ vacation budgets. At the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World in Orlando, single-day adult admission rose from $85 in 2011 to $89 in 2012, $95 in 2013, $99 in 2014, to $105 in 2015.

When reviewing your latest Comcast cable bill with overlimit fees on it (or a $30-35 upcharge to buy their insurance plan to keep extra fees off your bill), did you realize you are part of the Usage Economy?

With some Internet Service Providers and most wireless companies rushing to monetize your Internet usage (while also jacking up the price of service), a cottage industry of software and engineering “solutions”-developers have emerged to grab a piece of Monetize Pie.

This week LogiSense Corporation celebrated itself for another deployment of its EngageIP usage and rating platform. Granted, many of its customers are using it for business class services, but we enjoyed the word salad LogiSense created about the future of usage monetizing schemes that too often effectively gouge customers:

LogiSense enables enterprises to power the Usage Economy: The dynamic convergence of subscription- and usage-based billing models, allowing service providers to monetize in real-time any triggered event in the connected world to gain significant competitive advantages. Today’s usage economy is a highly complex environment with a matrixed ecosystem of consumers and providers generating transactions that require metering, measurement and monetization. EngageIP’s real-time rating, charging, billing and customer care capabilities enable providers to monetize any subscription, over any medium and from any provider. The system transforms clients’ business practices by empowering rapid turn up of new services, enabling innovation and new revenue streams thus ensuring longevity and relevance in a rapidly evolving market.

The original DOCSIS 3.1 standard offers up to 10/1Gbps speeds. Adding “full duplex” technology could boost that upstream speed as high as 10Gbps.

The cable industry is seeking to confront one of the strongest selling points of fiber broadband – identical upload and download speeds – by enhancing the DOCSIS 3.1 standard to support “full duplex” technology.

Since inception, cable broadband has been designed to deliver asymmetrical speeds, with priority given to download speeds. To this day, cable systems typically offer customers only a fraction of those fast download speeds for uploads. Cable broadband engineers originally assumed that since the majority of customer broadband usage would be on the download side, less bandwidth was needed for upstream activity. During the late 1990s, it was not uncommon to receive 6-10Mbps of download speed, while being offered just 384kbps for uploads. Today, 1-5Mbps is more typical for entry-level broadband upload speed, but that may no longer be sufficient.

The ongoing buzz for fiber broadband has called out this speed disparity. Most fiber to the home networks offer identical upload and download speeds, which can be as fast as 1,000Mbps or in some cases even faster. That marketing advantage may be costing some cable companies broadband customers. CableLabs, the engineering association of the cable industry, has been tasked with closing that gap and this week announced symmetrical speeds using the newest DOCSIS 3.1 specification are on the fast track and a release schedule could be announced as early as mid-2016.

Dan Rice, CableLabs’s senior vice president of R&D, told Multichannel News “full duplex” will be an extension of DOCSIS 3.1, not a replacement, which guarantees a faster rollout of the enhancement.

The delivery of symmetrical Internet speeds will likely require some cable operators to make hardware changes to their infrastructure. Key to that may be ridding cable plant of multiple amplifiers and filters installed between the cable company’s nearest fiber node and the customer’s home. As cable operators push more reliable fiber further out into their networks, reducing the amount of coaxial copper cable in use, network advancements become easier and less costly.

Whether cable companies will use the enhanced upstream broadband capacity to match their download speeds or just moderately improve them isn’t known. The completion of the enhanced specification will likely give engineers and accountants at each cable company a better idea of how much upload bang for the buck makes the most sense.

CenturyLink is planning to trial usage caps on its broadband service later this year, not to reduce congestion or to bank the extra money for service upgrades, but to boost revenue and profits.

Stewart Ewing, chief financial officer at CenturyLink, told Wall Street analysts the company was on board with usage caps and usage billing primarily because its biggest competitor (Comcast) is already implementing a similar program in many of its markets. It’s that kind of “competition” many customers say they could do without.

“Regarding the metered data plans; we are considering that for second half of the year,” Ewing told investors on a morning conference call. “We think it is important and our competition is using the metered plans today and we think that exploring those starts and trials later this year is our expectation.”

No details about the test markets or range of usage allowances were made available by Ewing, but CenturyLink is under pressure by Wall Street to improve its revenue after raising prices and tightening credit standards on its customers. The combined impact of rate hikes and a tighter credit qualification policy led CenturyLink to lose 22,000 broadband customers during the last quarter, many who simply stopped paying the bill.

CenturyLink has been under pressure by Wall Street to put usage caps and usage pricing on its broadband service for over a year.

David Barden from Bank of America called data caps “an opportunity” for CenturyLink to rake in more dollars from customers by using misleading pricing to trick customers.

Post

“We have been seeing a lot of the cable companies experimenting with data caps and metering higher-end usage,” Barden told CenturyLink executives on the conference call. “It seems like the FCC is not pushing back on this and it feels like it could be a big opportunity for telcos to, if nothing else, price underneath the cable umbrella and start to raise rates from high-end users.”

In plain English, Barden wants companies like CenturyLink to make customers believe they are getting a better deal from a lower price, at least until customers actually use the service. Then, the rate increases from usage caps and overlimit fees begin.

Glen Post, CEO of CenturyLink, is still committed to believing CenturyLink is in a good position to add broadband customers, despite the forthcoming trials of usage caps and overlimit fees. He defines 40Mbps broadband from CenturyLink as the speed that will “address most of our customers’ actual needs.”

CenturyLink now has 940,000 households connected to its Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON), many for its Prism TV service. Another 490,000 businesses also have access to CenturyLink’s GPON network, primarily for broadband. Post claims more than 30% of the company’s service area is now served with broadband speeds of 40Mbps or greater.

In 2016, CenturyLink expects to spend $1.2 billion on upgrades for its broadband network and capacity. In comparison, in 2015 CenturyLink spent $1 billion repurchasing shares of its own stock and another $1 billion on dividend payouts – both to benefit shareholders.

At present, CenturyLink has around a 15% market share in its GPON-enabled markets (the company didn’t say what its market share was where legacy copper wire infrastructure still dominates). Post believes that gives the phone company enormous room to grow, assuming its customers can pass credit checks and do not mind their broadband service data-capped. Like many phone companies looking for the biggest return on investment, Post noted CenturyLink will pay extra attention to wiring Multiple Dwelling Units (MDUs) — apartment buildings, condos, etc. — where the company can bring fiber service at a lower cost than wiring each home and business.