Time Warner Wants to Up Your Internet Bill Based on Usage

By | January 17th, 2008 comments icon (3) Comments


time warner logoObviously not sensing customer resistance to increased internet usage billing, Reuters is reporting that Time Warner Cable is planning on running a trial where high-bandwidth users of their internet service will be billed more. The company is insisting that this trial (in Beaumont, TX) is intended to reduce congestion on its network, which is slowing due to heavy usage. Amazingly, Time Warner Cable – which currently has about 7.4 million residential Internet subscribers – is “…hoping the move will not confuse consumers if introduced nationwide…”. Wow, ya think?

Sadly, this trend appears to be one that other companies will be joining in on. Whereas most users won’t see a change to their pricing or service right now, one has to wonder what kind of impact this pricing structure will have in the coming months and years as online video delivery becomes more mainstream. On the flip side, as online video does become more popular it will become critical for internet providers to increase bandwidth and to make their networks more robust. Those improvements cost money, and as much as we’d like, these companies are not going to do the work for free. It would appear that the days of fixed-price billing for internet usage may be coming to an abrupt end.





Filed in: Broadband

  • Andrew McLaughlin

    Sadly this move provides further disincentive for broadband providers to build out the network for future increases in bandwidth demand and sets a precedent around limiting users total bandwidth and optimizing current total bandwidth along by charging for usage. While I don’t fundamentally disagree with this principle, I highly doubt the implementation will be consumer friendly and low usage users will not get some special / proportionate discount. Any such provision should include standardized increases in allowed bandwitdh to promote further investment in the networks and to account for the natural market factors that require users to use more bandwidth as technology evolves.

  • http://jennyfur.textamerica.com jennyfur

    Nothing good can come of this.
    :(

  • aperry

    I heard about this and agree that nothing good can come from this. Depending on what they consider to be “normal”, I think a ton of their users are in for a very rude awakening.