Comcast Corp., the nation's largest provider of cable TV and Internet services, more than doubled its net income in the third quarter, chiefly due to the sale of wireless spectrum and its stake in the A&E TV channel.

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Several years ago, Comcast began instituting bandwidth caps of 250GB per month on its residential customers. In 2008, this was plenty for most customers, but with the advent of streaming video services like Netflix, Hulu, WatchESPN and others, some users have been concerned about whether the 250GB cap was sufficient for their needs.

Today, Comcast has announced it is revamping its cap system, instituting larger caps with the ability for customers to purchase additional gigabytes in blocks.

The first new approach will offer multi-tier usage allowances that incrementally increase usage allotments for each tier of high-speed data service from the current threshold. Thus, we'd start with a 300 GB usage allotment for our Internet Essentials, Economy, and Performance Tiers, and then we would have increasing data allotments for each successive tier of high speed data service (e.g., Blast and Extreme). The very few customers who use more data at each tier can buy additional gigabytes in increments/blocks (e.g., $10 for 50 GB).

The second new approach will increase our data usage thresholds for all tiers to 300 GB per month and also offer additional gigabytes in increments/blocks (e.g., $10 per 50 GB).

In both approaches, we'll be increasing the initial data usage threshold for our customers from today's 250 GB per month to at least 300 GB per month.

In its blog post, Comcast notes that it is continuing to "consider other ways to ensure that all of our customers are treated fairly and have a consistent and superior experience while using our residential high speed Internet service in the way in which it is intended."

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