Buying Internet Access Piecemeal
Time to revolt slaves of Time Warner:
This Thursday, new cable Internet customers in Beaumont, Texas will no longer have unmetered Internet bandwidth - they’re guinea pigs in a new pricing scheme being pushed by Time-Warner that will give users between 5 and 40 gigabytes in total monthly data usage (uploads and downloads combined). Data usage over that amount will be billed at $1 per gigabyte. Competitor Comcast is also considering metered bandwidth.
The goal is to limit average data usage, allowing Time-Warner to get more customers into their existing fiber infrastructure. Since there is little or no competition for Internet connectivity, they don’t have to worry so much about losing customers.
Sounds to me like Time Warner needs a good dose of competition. The technology is out there to give consumers more while Time Warner wants to give them less. I hope the telephone companies and others (say wireless) move in and clean their clocks.
The last thing we want is for this kind of thing to take off. I doubt it will as long as the government doesn’t step in and limit competition. I have no idea how much I download, but I don’t want to worry about hitting limit, let alone believing them when they say I went over.
