Remember when AOL used to charge by the hour in the early days of the Web? If you were online back then and were grinding teeth over $100+ bills, the good old days may be here again!
Time Warner is saying to hell with unlimited access, and is planning to "meter" bandwidth and data transfers with a variable pricing structure similar to what you pay for cell phone minutes and electricity.
Some customers of Time Warner Cable in Beaumont, Texas, may soon end up paying more for their Internet access than other customers.
In a test of metered Internet access that's set to begin Thursday, subscribers who go over their limit for uploading and downloading material will be charged $1 per gigabyte, according to an Associated Press story, citing a Time Warner Cable executive.
The tiered pricing will work this way, for the Internet portion of subscription packages that also include phone or video use: At the low end, users will pay $29.95 per month for service at a speed of 768 kilobits per second, with a 5GB monthly cap. At the high end, users will pay $54.90 per month for service at 15 megabits per second, with a 40GB cap.
Why such a paltry allotment of bandwidth, you may ask?
"We think it's the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure," Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable's executive vice president of advanced technology, said in Monday's AP story. He said that just 5 percent of the company's subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines.
Leddy is either ignorant, or indifferent, as to how Internet usage does not reflect Time Warner's proposed amounts.
Hitting your monthly bandwidth ration is much easier than just illegally downloading a terabyte of movies and porn from Bit Torrent.
Let's say you go to a lot of websites that use Flash, or have a lot of graphic ads that make them load slower?
What if you use iTunes, Pandora or Netflix a lot? Or if you play World of Warcraft, or use the online sections for your XBox 360 or Wii?
How about those massive updates in the form of Windows Service Packs or decimal updates to Mac OS X 10.5? What about when applications installed (either legit or malware) start phoning home without your knowledge? Or if your computer has become hijacked and becomes part of a botnet or is involved with a DDoS attack?
If you have experienced a combination of these exchanges of data (as almost everyone hooked up to a router and modem have) then you're in for some nasty bills if Time Warner and other ISPs decide to make this pricing formula their standard.
Now, some of you may think that dumping Time Warner for a rival ISP is your solution. Given that cable companies often enjoy monopoly status, and considering the fact that some people don't even have DSL as an alternative in some regions, many users (and even businesses) will be SOL.