• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, July 8, 2016

Earlier this week, Comcast made headlines for bringing Netflix's app to set-top boxes.

But today, the cable giant is in the news for reasons that aren't as consumer friendly. Comcast -- which already has legions of dissatisfied customers -- is introducing its unpopular data caps to more markets, including Chicago.

"If you get your internet from Comcast, we're so sorry," Chicagoist writes in a new blog post. The author adds that Comcast -- already "terrible -- is "about to get worse."

Starting Aug. 1, Comcast's broadband customers in Chicago who consume more than 1 Terabyte of data per month will face overages ranging from $10 to $200. People also will be able to pay an extra $50 per month for unlimited data.

The 1 TB maximum is more generous than Comcast's former cap, which was set at 300 GB a month. The company revised the cap upward in April, shortly after the Federal Communications Commission required Charter to promise to avoid data caps for at least seven years as a condition of its merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. That mandate was seen as a signal that regulators weren't happy with data caps.

Thousands of customers who were hit with overages for exceeding the old caps complained about the company to the FCC. Many of those people said they subscribe to Comcast because it's the only high-speed Web provider in their neighborhoods. "There are 6 people living in my household who use the internet daily so we go over the limit pretty fast," one customer wrote to the FCC last October. "I have no choice but to pay the fees due to there being no other adequate Internet service provider in Miami."

Consumer advocacy groups urged the FCC to investigate whether Comcast was implementing data caps in ways that undermine net neutrality rules by giving subscribers incentives to avoid consuming online video offered by competitors.

The advocates focused specifically on Stream -- a relatively new $15-a-month service that gives broadband-only subscribers access to many of the same programs that cable customers can watch. Videos watched through Stream are exempt from the data caps.

Comcast's move to increase the data cap seems to have staved off criticism of the service, given that less than 1% of customers consume 1 TB of data per month. Comcast says one TB is enough to stream 700 hours of HD video, play 12,000 hours of online games, and download 60,000 high-res photos.

But even if the caps are sufficient for most households today, that may not always be the case. Data consumption will only increase when more high-bandwidth services -- like telemedicine, for instance -- grow more popular.