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Remember the good old days when all we needed to worry about from our ISPs was net neutrality?  Those were great days when there were no caps on what we could use our Internet connection for, and we were scared it might turn into cable TV-like subscription.  Now not only is net neutrality still a bit of an issue, there’s the issue of bandwidth caps, with ISPs trying to limit just how much data we download or upload.

Time Warner Cable is the latest ISP to institute the idea of caps, and will be expanding its once Texas-based test to Rochester, NY; Greensboro, NC; Austin, TX; and San Antonio, TX.  TWC had previously announced its pricing tiers starting at 10GB at $15 up to 60GB per month.  The last two tiers in the program have finally been announced.  There’s the 100GB for a measly $75 per month, and double that price for unlimited access.  Of course, to some people these data caps won’t be much of an issue; actually for most people they won’t be.  In some unspecified markets, users will be able to access a DOCSIS 3 network for $99, with much faster speeds and potentially no caps, unless the price is just added on top of the tier price.  That would make for $250 per month for 50 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload, which is insane.

The network caps are almost specifically meant to deal with the top 1% of Internet users who use most of the bandwidth on the networks.  Who are the top 1%?  Probably people who stream videos from Hulu and Netflix regularly, spend time gaming, and possibly use BitTorrent on a regular basis.  That doesn’t even get into purchasing digital content from iTunes, PlayStation Store, Xbox Live, Amazon, etc, which can all add up very quickly.  These caps are currently just in testing in these markets, though, let’s hope they don’t stick.

Read [Wired]