You"re used to paying extra if you use up your cell phone minutes, but will you be willing to pay extra if your home computer goes over its Internet allowance? Time Warner Cable Inc. customers -- and, later, others -- may have to, if the company"s test of metered Internet access is successful. On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.
Metered billing is an attempt to deal fairly with Internet usage, which is very uneven among Time Warner Cable"s subscribers, said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable"s executive vice president of advanced technology. Just 5 percent of the company"s subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines, Leddy said. Other cable Internet service providers report a similar distribution.
"We think it"s the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure," Leddy said.