Time Warner Tries Internet Tiered Pricing

Time Warner has announced that it will conduct a trial run of tiered pricing for high-speed internet later this year.

The company, the second-largest cable provider in the United States, will start a trial in Beaumont, Texas, in which it will sell new Internet customers tiered levels of service based on how much data they download per month, rather than the usual fixed-price packages with unlimited downloads.

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.

All your internet are belong to us.

More: This type of service will probably affect me less than I fear. I don't download much video, except a movie off iTunes every once in a while. Still, I play an awful lot of Halo 3 on Xbox Live and I have absolutely no idea how much data up and down that takes.

But hardly matters. Y'know how much of a pain it is to buy the right amount of minutes for your cell phone? Feel like doing that with your internet, too?

Yeah, me neither.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 01:46 PM

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