Time Warner Cable begins metered Internet trials

Time Warner Cable on Monday announced it is going through with trials of its metered Internet services for new subscribers in Beaumont, Texas. Yahoo writes that only new, not existing, customers would be part of the test, but would initially be unsusceptible to the plans' extraneous fees. Under normal circumstances, users who surpass the bandwidth limit would be charged $1 per gigabyte in excess of up to a 40GB cap.

The plans will vary from a low-usage 768KB per second connection, with 5GB of bandwidth at $30, up to a 15MB per second service, with 40GB of transfer, going for $55 a month.

Time Warner claims that the tests result from their usage statistics, which show a mere 5-percent of users occupying 50-percent of the company's cable lines. Executive vice president of Time Warner's advanced technology department Kevin Leddy believes "it's the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure," referring to users' ever-increasing needs for bandwidth as richer media becomes commonly available.

Filed under: industry, networking
Other story tags: limit, internet service, Time Warner Cable