Cox Communications is informing Louisiana customers that they'll be raising both TV and broadband prices this fall. According to The Advocate, basic cable customers will be seeing a price hike of $2.58 per month, and those who subscribe to expanded basic will pay another $3 per month. Premium services like HBO and Showtime will also be seeing $1 hikes. Cox customers on starter, value, preferred or premier broadband tiers can also expect rate hikes of between $2 and $3 a month. The hikes are occurring in Lafayette, despite the added competition in the market from the local municipal fiber deployment Cox tried so very hard to derail.

Last year Comcast faced an FCC investigation and endless media scrutiny for their decision to use packet forgery to throttle upstream P2P for all users. Cox dodged much of that media attention despite the fact they were busy doing roughly the same thing. That's in part because nobody noticed what Cox was doing (well, almost anybody). But it's also because unlike Comcast, Cox didn't lie about what they were up to when asked about it.

Things of course have changed a lot since last year, with Comcast employing a new network management system that instead of throttling all P2P users, temporarily throttles only the highest consumption users on the most congested nodes. Cox too quietly backed off their upstream throttling and packet forgery approach, and instead began testing a network management system in Kansas and Arkansas that throttled only applications Cox somewhat arbitrarily declared to be "non-time sensitive" (like P2P or software updates).

Just a few days after Cox bumped speeds in some of their more competitive markets, a Cox employee has stopped by our forums to indicate that the carrier has clarified their usage caps. With the FCC (and State Attorneys General) increasingly demanding network limitation transparency with consumers, the Cox website now not only lists concrete usage limits for all tiers, but the various top speeds they provision in each Cox market (which is usually dictated by the level of competition they're facing).

According to the Cox website, their top "Premier" offering comes with top speeds ranging from 15-25 Mbps, with a 250 GB monthly (combined up/down) usage cap. Their "Preferred" package comes with speeds ranging from 9-15 Mbps, with a 200 GB monthly usage cap.

According to Multichannel News, Cox just finished upgrading 86,000 miles of the carrier's 106,000 miles of coaxial plant to 1 Gigahertz. The upgrades give Cox a little added legroom when provisioning broadband and HD services, by providing markets with 140 to 250 MHz of additional bandwidth to work with. The report notes that Cox, who says they've spent $16 billion on upgrades over the next decade, will have spent more on the 1 GHz upgrades than they plan to spend on building out a wireless network. Cox is still fairly tight-lipped about their wireless broadband plans, but earlier this year vendors noted Cox would go from CDMA to LTE.

On the heels of launching faster DOCSIS 3.0 service and faster 50 Mbps speeds in parts of Rhode Island, Louisiana, Arizona and Northern Virginia, Cox says they're now boosting the speeds of their Preferred and Premier broadband tiers starting September 29. According to Cox, the company's Preferred tier will be increased to 15 Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream. Their Premier tier will be bumped to 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream. Both tiers come with Powerboost, which will nudge speeds for the first part of a download or upload to 20/2.5 and 30/3.5, respectively.