Time Warner Cable Inc. customers beware: If you're what the company considers a heavy Internet user, you could soon be charged as much as $150 a month for online access.
The sky-high charge is part of a new "consumption-based billing" system that Time Warner will test this summer to address what it says is the possibility of "brownouts" on the Net within three years because of soaring usage.
"Internet demand is rising at a rate that could outpace capacity within a few years," Time Warner Cable's chief operating officer, Landel Hobbs, said in a statement. "It will take a lot of money to fix the problem."
He said the company would introduce a "tiered model" in New York and North Carolina "in which users pay more if they use more." The new billing system would reach Texas in the fall, and other states could follow.
It's unclear what Time Warner, the dominant cable provider in Southern California, will do with the extra cash. Presumably it intends to invest at least a portion of it into improving the network, but Hobbs doesn't say.
AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. are exploring similar moves to address what Internet service providers see as the biggest challenge to their networks as video viewing becomes increasingly popular among Net users.
Never mind YouTube and its bite-size clips. The issue for telecom companies is services like Netflix, the online video rental company, which allows subscribers to instantly view entire movies and shows on their computer or TV via the Net.
"The cable companies argue that they can't handle this demand," said Karl Bode, editor of BroadBand Reports.com, a website devoted to high-speed Internet use. "But if you look more closely, the growth of the Internet is manageable through reasonable equipment upgrades."
He sees tiered pricing primarily as a money grab by the gatekeepers to the Net.
"They're just trying to monetize Internet video," Bode said. "They want people to accept the idea of metered billing so that when Internet video expands, it will be more profitable because families will be comfortable paying for each gigabyte used, rather than the current all-you-can-eat system."
That may be. But it seems to me that if I'm using the Net primarily to surf the Web and access e-mail, and my neighbor is using it to watch the director's cuts of "The Lord of the Rings," my neighbor should be paying more to keep the pipes flowing.
