It’s coming to my area:
In April, Time Warner Cable will begin collecting information on its customers’ Internet use in the Texas cities of Austin and San Antonio and in Rochester, N.Y. Consumption billing will begin in those cities later this summer.
Fighting29th explains:
There’s nothing wrong with the concept of usage-based Internet pricing, but all of the usage tiering I’ve seen is unrealistic. Time-Warner’s is no exception: by one calculation, their top tier, which is still pretty limited, would lead to $200/month in overage charges for a family whose use I’d classify as “moderate”.
I will switch to our other broadband provider, Frontier, ASAP, but they have also proposed internet usage caps (of 5GB). Fighting29th expands:
There’s little or no competition in the home Internet market — Time-Warner has a monopoly in large parts of the 29th district. One way to get a real market here and elsewhere is to treat Internet service the way we treat telephone service. Local service – the connection to the nearest switching center – would be the responsibility of Time-Warner or Frontier and have a regulated, low price based on the actual cost of delivering the service. At the switching center, other, nationwide bandwidth providers would be able to compete with Frontier or Time-Warner for our Internet business.
Like long-distance, once real competition hit the market, we’d see an ever-diminishing cost for Internet bandwidth. It’s only because TWC and Frontier have a monopoly that they’d even consider $200/month Internet pricing. Their recent actions have shown that their Internet monopoly needs to be broken.
A website has formed to fight this, but who knows how successful it will be.