TechJournal

[AP] Time Warner Cable will experiment with a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access later this year, charging customers based on how much data they download, a company spokesman said Wednesday.

Time Warner is the second largest  cable broadband internet service provider in the US and they will start selling new service packages based on how much their subscribers download rather than the usual fixed price packages they currently have.  Putting a meter on the subscribers' broadband may not be as friendly as the unlimited packages but it is to curb the amount of traffic and congestion some of their users create.

"Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network performance by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. Dudley said that a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity." -AP

Now, this will only probably hurt the heavy downloaders and not the usual average internet user but isn't this the same thing the FCC is charging Comcast with?  I thing that legal issues will come up next.  Though it would be interesting to know how much the new pricing scheme will cost the average non heavy download user. 

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