Time Warner Cable Experimenting Metered Broadband Access
by Tim Stevens, posted Jun 3rd 2008 at 11:01AM
Back in the old days of the Internet, when a 14.4 kilobyte-per-second dial-up connection was hot, providers charged by the hour -- a flat fee for a dozen or so hours' worth of time online and a couple bucks more for each additional. As Internet access became more popular, prices dropped and subscribers dumped such plans in favor of "all you can eat" packages, but it appears that Time Warner is feeling a bit retro, experimenting with these sorts of caps on unfortunate subscribers down in Texas.About 90,000 customers of Time Warner's cable Internet access have been put on a new tiered and capped download service, ranging in price from a relatively anemic 768 kilobits-per-second for $30 per month up to a rather more speedy 15 megabits-per-second for $55 per month. Those prices are in-line with their current rates, but the catch is those caps: Just five gigabytes of downloads per month on the cheaper plan while the upper-tier plan is capped at forty gigabytes. There's a dollar-per-gig fee over that.
Forty gigabytes -- about a small iPod Nano's worth of tunes -- may sound like a lot, but this could be a huge roadblock to burgeoning video-on-demand services, as each film's size can easily exceed one to two gigabytes (with high-definition downloadable films often twice that or more). If you're also into music streaming, online gaming, or downloading the latest apps to your machine, this change could potentially be quite expensive. Will it succeed? That remains to be seen, but if initial reactions are any clue, Verizon's competing FiOS service might just be seeing a flood of new subscribers in the near future. [Disclosure: Switched is part of the Time Warner family] [Source: AOL Money & Finance]
