Time Warner Cable to begin charging extra for Internet usage beyond a certain amount in Rochester NY, other cities
… customers will be charged from $29.95 to $54.90 a month, based on data consumption and desired connection speed. Customers will be charged $1 for each gigabyte (GB) over their plan’s cap. Time Warner Cable offers four cap levels of 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB. A download of a high-definition movie typically eats up about 8 GB. A recent report from Sanford C. Bernstein suggests that a family on the 40 GB plan that streams 7.25 hours of online video a week (a fraction of the 60 hours Americans spend watching TV in a week) could end up spending $200 per month on broadband usage fees. And that’s just for video viewing, before factoring in such Internet activities as music downloads and photo sharing.
As an Ars Technica reader commented, it’s very telling that they’re doing this in Rochester, but not in neighbouring city Buffalo, in the latter of which Time Warner faces steep competition from Verizon’s FiOS, a superior service even without considering extra usage fees.
It’s not yet clear if or how this affects customers who use EarthLink Cable via Time Warner, such as myself, but you can bet I’ll be looking into DSL.
Usage note: this type of plan is sometimes incorrectly referred to by the press as a ‘bandwidth cap’. Bandwidth refers to the sustainable data rate, e.g., 10 Mbps. The announced changes would not have any effect on bandwidth. A more accurate description would be ‘transfer cap’, as it is a limitation (or punitive billing) based on the amount of total data one transfers per month.
Edit: some more info (but mostly speculation) here. Also, an article in the local paper which seems to come across with an oddly corporate-pandering attitude, but does have a helpful chart.
