Your next Comcast bill may be priced per gigabyte

Beginning Oct 1, residents of Florida communities Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and the Florida Keys will become part of what feels like a never-ending experiment in pricing by America’s No. 1 broadband provider. Comcast plans to implement what it calls a new data usage trial. Everyone else calls it a data cap.

Under the plan, customers who use more than 300 gigabytes of data in a month will pay $10 to buy 50 additional gigabytes or $30 for unlimited data use. Comcast is testing a variety of such plans across the country with a common goal -- to bring the per-gigabyte pricing prevalent in wireless smartphone contracts to broadband Internet. Its rationale for such a move? To ensure that it can preserve its income as more customers drop classic cable TV service in favor of broadband Internet and the data-devouring TV services (known as “over the top” or “OTT”) from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple, and others.