One of the biggest Internet broadband providers in the US is thinking once again about putting in metered Internet usage for its customers, two years after a previous attempt was shut down. Bloomberg reports that Time Warner Cable is reportedly testing new technology that would measure how much data its customers use for its net access.
According to the article the company"s CEO Glenn Britt has said that while they are testing this new metered system Time Warner Cable has yet to decide if they will launch the system to all its customers. If Time Warner Cable does decide to put in a metered Internet system for its customers its likely to be much like other ISP have in place with an overall broadband cap with overage fees for going over that data cap.
Back in 2009, Time Warner Cable started a test program in some sections of the US where it tried a metered billing system for Internet access. The broadband cap for some of its customers were as low as 40 GBs of data a month. Customer reaction to this plan was needless to say not positive and Time Warner Cable quietly shut down the pilot program a few months later. However the head of the company seems to still believe that metered Internet pricing will still happen at some point. The web site Stop The Cap reports that earlier this month Britt told a group at a Wall Street investor event, " ... people who want to spend eight hours a day watching video online is fine with me, but they should pay more than somebody who reads e-mail once a week."