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Down To Business: Meter Starts To Tick On Internet Access Pricing
Is Time Warner abusing its monopoly and whoring for profits, or just going after its fair share?
By Rob Preston
InformationWeek
June 7, 2008 12:00 AM (From the June 9, 2008 issue)
Judging from the outcry, you'd have thought that martial law had been imposed on the Lone Star State. The news: Time Warner Cable plans to test metered pricing for its Internet access service, starting in Beaumont, a city of 114,000 in eastern Texas.
Under the pilot program, instead of charging a flat fee for unlimited service, Time Warner plans to charge customers an additional $1 per month for each gigabyte of content they download or send over their allotment. Its service starts at $29.95 per month for speeds of 768 Kbps, with a limit of 5 GB, which Time Warner estimates would amount to some 340,000 e-mails, 170 hours of online games, or 1,300 downloaded songs. At the premium end, customers pay $54.90 a month for speeds of 15 Mbps and a limit of 40 GB, which amounts to 124 hours of standard-definition video or 11,000 song downloads. Comcast has been considering a similar pricing scheme for select markets.
Time Warner told the Associated Press that metered pricing is "the fairest way" to finance needed investments in its network infrastructure. The cable company estimates that 5% of customers now use half of the capacity on its local lines without having to pay more than low-usage customers.
Critics of the Time Warner plan argue that the company is abusing its monopoly (it evidently has one in Beaumont), is whoring for "excess profits," and that its plan would damage the commercial "ecosystem" that depends on cheap Internet access. Read some of the hundred-plus comments posted to Antone Gonsalves' story "Time Warner Cable To Test Metered Internet Access" for some thoughtful perspectives (and a few rants) on the Time Warner initiative. This issue isn't clear-cut.
40gb ... some months that is the lowest I do ...
since I installed this Bandwidth Monitoring Program in Nov
Nov - 8.12
Dec - 48.69
Jan - 55.80
Feb - 50.06
Mar - 47.02
Apr - 11.46
May - 7.35
June 14.20
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