None of the prices quoted here include taxes and fees for extra equipment. Comcast also notes that prices may vary by location. Considering these caveats, it’s likely that your bill for these plans will be higher than the quoted prices. Still, it’s instructive to note the very small price difference between the cord-cutting plan and the TV-and-Internet plan.

Image Credit... Minh Uong/The New York Times

Cutting the cord, in Comcast’s universe, just doesn’t save you very much money. Comcast has carefully set up pricing to get you whether you watch shows the old-fashioned way, on a boob-tube fed with a cable, or whether you prefer to veg out with Netflix on your iPad. Either way, you’re probably paying hundreds of dollars a year to maintain your vital hook to the outside world. And if you consider the added costs of Netflix and streaming rentals, it’s possible that the cord cutter may be paying more, over all, than someone who subscribes to cable.

Whether and how Comcast’s bid for Time Warner Cable will further shape pricing will be a matter of fierce debate before regulators sitting in judgment of the deal. In its presentation announcing the bid, Comcast argued that because it doesn’t currently offer service in markets served by Time Warner Cable, acquiring it won’t reduce competition in those markets.

The company also points out that it is now bound by consumer-protection conditions that the Federal Communications Commission applied as part of Comcast’s acquisition of NBC Universal in 2011 — protections that Comcast is willing to extend to Time Warner Cable’s customers. Among these protections are “open access” rules, also known as network-neutrality provisions, which prevent Comcast from favoring certain content over its network.

For instance, the rules would prohibit Comcast from slowing Netflix streaming unless Netflix paid Comcast an extra fee, a model that has been floated by some in the television industry. Because a federal court struck down a more widely applicable set of open-access rules in January, Time Warner Cable is not bound by any similar provisions. Comcast’s acquisition, then, would technically extend the rules to cover more Americans.

Critics note that the F.C.C.’s neutrality conditions expire in 2018, after which Comcast would be free to start new, network-neutrality-violating business models for its services — perhaps, for example, charging Netflix a fee to get a faster network speed.

More immediately, they point out that while Time Warner Cable imposes no limit on how much data its Internet subscribers can download, Comcast might not be as lenient. Comcast once imposed a a data cap of 250 gigabytes a month on its subscribers. It has since scrapped that plan, and is instead experimenting — in select cities — with a plan that includes up to 300 gigabytes of data a month, plus the option to purchase additional data at a rate of $10 per 50 gigabytes. These caps are very high — enough to stream dozens of high-definition movies a month, so the limits shouldn’t be a problem for most customers. But if Comcast imposes such a cap, a few of Time Warner Cable’s most active cord cutters might feel the pinch.