People complain enough about it being $50. Sadly though, I think people would still shell over $100/year just to play online.

at a moment where sales are low.. price raising is the best thing to do..

I recall a time, not too long ago, when "gore" tried to double the price on their Elixir guitar strings...it failed, a lot of their biggest resellers like Guitar Centers and many small mom and pop shops, stopped ordering the strings. Those who were lucky enough to still have a butt load in stock, continued to sell the strings at the original price. Funny thing is, a few months later, "gore" backed down. the repercussions, however, were huge. many shops continued the boycott, and Guitar Centers are just now selling the strings again. I think this would happen with live if the price got doubled. I don't think Walmart would sell it anymore, and I know Costco would stop. MS would lose a LOT of paying gold members, the repercussions from such a move could be huge.

Cutting Arcade 20$ and raising XBL to $100, besides increasing console sales, would give MS $30 more the first year the user owns the console and $50 more each successive year, so raising XBL and masking it with a small cut on HW makes sense.
As MS controls which services users can access, even those free accessing the net with anything different from MS stuff, it's cheap and easy to add features to justify the increase. If I were Ballmer, for example, to maximize direct and indirect benefits, I'd include Bing in the standard services and I'd make people pay a hefty extra fee to access Google.

When my live account expires, I'm tempted to buy a ps3 instead of buying one more year for xbox live. After using live for 2 almost years I wonder why I pay money for online gaming when there are free alternatives on the PC and PSN.
The should lower the costs instead of raising it: the quality difference of Live and PSN don't differ that much anymore.

The hell is wrong with that guy? Is he that desperate for attention?

Advertising will be key: MS will be able to charge an extra for ad-free accounts too.

as if, it will likely get cheaper if anything (thats when i'll become an xbox trooper) and hypothetically speaking if it did happen it would be PSPGo MS style.

You can insult Microsoft about a lot of things but being stupid is not one of them. As is, Live is on almost on par with Home. Home/PSN is free... it is already a big selling point for the PS3. If MS puts the price of live up to $100, sales of X360 console and games will plummet...

^^^Shoestar said that Live is almost on par with Home. Stopped me dead in my tracks.