It seems that Comcast is making things more uniform. They've had what amounts to neighborhood-by-neighborhood policies for quite a while, depending upon which cable company you were with when they got eaten. I'm seeing lots of reports all of a sudden; when they do something like this on such a broad scale it rarely seems to benefit the consumers.

RCN supposedly will grant you a static IP with no port blocking (in or out). When I last talked to them, this was $20/month; that may have changed. Our base package (which seems very similar to dsrtao's, is based at $122 (without static IP). I should ask them again what the current rate is.