Barbara Lindsey's List: ISP

• On Thursday, new Time Warner Cable Internet subscribers in Beaumont, Texas, will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Those who go over will be charged $1 per gigabyte, a Time Warner Cable executive told the Associated Press.
• Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable's executive vice president of advanced technology
• Just 5 percent of the company's subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines, Leddy said.
• Metered usage is common overseas, and other U.S. cable providers are looking at ways to rein in heavy users.
• Time Warner Cable appears to be the first major ISP to charge for going over the limit
• Phone companies are less concerned about congestion and are unlikely to impose metered usage on DSL customers, because their networks are structured differently.
• Leddy said its tiers will range from $29.95 a month for relatively slow service at 768 kilobits per second and a 5-gigabyte monthly cap to $54.90 per month for fast downloads at 15 megabits per second and a 40-gigabyte cap
• But those who download movies or TV shows will want to pay attention. A standard-definition movie can take up 1.5 gigabytes, and a high-definition movie can be 6 to 8 gigabytes.
• Time Warner Cable subscribers will be able to check out their data consumption on a "gas gauge" on the company's Web page.
• The company won't apply the gigabyte surcharges for the first two months. It has 90,000 customers in the trial area, but only new subscribers will be part of the trial.
• Metered billing could also put a crimp in the plans of services like Apple Inc.'s iTunes that use the Internet to deliver video. DVD-by-mail pioneer Netflix Inc. just launched a TV set-top box that receives an unlimited stream of Internet video for as little as $8.99 per month.
• Comcast Corp., the country's largest cable company, has suggested that it may cap usage at 250 gigabytes per month.
• Bend Cable Communications in Bend, Ore., used to have multitier bandwidth allowances, like the ones Time Warner Cable will test, but it abandoned them in favor of an across-the-board 100-gigabyte cap. Bend charges $1.50 per extra gigabyte consumed in a month.

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