Monday June 2
By Peter Svensson, AP Technology Writer
Time Warner Cable starts customer trial with metered Internet access in Texas
NEW YORK (AP) -- You're used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance?
Time Warner Cable Inc. customers -- and, later, others -- may have to, if the company's test of metered Internet access is successful.
On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.
Metered billing is an attempt to deal fairly with Internet usage, which is very uneven among Time Warner Cable's subscribers, said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable's executive vice president of advanced technology.
Just 5 percent of the company's subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines, Leddy said. Other cable Internet service providers report a similar distribution.
"We think it's the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure," Leddy said.
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*****
There have been
stories for years about Comcast harassing it's unlimited usage customers for .... using too much bandwidth. Apparently, their limit is a moving target based on the aggregate whole. Then they terminate your service once you fall into the upper 1/10th of 1% for bandwidth usage among all customers.
Which sucks if you are a subscriber to online movies, player of WoW, etc.