At first this struck me as expensive, in the sense that per Gbps, I get a much better price from Comcast. And then I remembered all of the externalities that come along with that price: data caps, potential monitoring, bad customer support and whatever else I'm forgetting.

How much is avoiding those actually worth to me? Probably pretty close to the price difference, actually, and if those things are really important to me I should be willing to walk the walk and pay for them.

I won't, because I don't live in Philadelphia, but I hope to have real viable alternatives where I do live.