Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

If you are a heavy user of high-speed Internet, your happy days of peer-to-peer downloading might soon be over. Time Warner Cable, currently the second largest U.S. cable operator, plans to shift from the standard flat fee to a usage-based billing scheme.

The Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas are the chosen guinea pigs for the first trial run. The test is slated later this year but the terms had not been set yet.

Since video downloading and streaming are very popular nowadays, the cable operator claims this is a strategy to minimize network congestion. Moreover, it assured the public that its impact is very minimal for only 5% of all customers are considered heavy users. In fact, this new billing scheme is claimed to be very favorable for the majority of light users.

Other cable companies are quietly observing the results of this new pricing test. If proven effective without much hullabaloo, this could entice other players to adopt this scheme and abandon flat fee pricing totally.

Read [Reuters]

• Easy Wi-Fi for AT&T temporarily free
• New .tel domain opens up
• Reality TV meets Symphonies and Youtube

Sections: Computers, Web, Downloads