Ask Madden

Time Warner has released a plan to change their billing to reflect bandwidth usage. With their plan (which they are testing out in Beaumont, Texas), each customer would pay a different rate based on his internet bandwith usage. This is suposedly to address the concern over increased internet congestion from users who do such high-bandwidth activities as online gaming, streaming videos and (though not explicitly mentioned) torrent downloading.

This is utterly ridiculous. The claim is that by charging a premium to users who use a larger share of total available bandwidth, less frequent internet users wont feel 'jipped' by having to pay the same amount as those users who use many times the amount of bandwidth each month. However, in reality, this is just an excuse by Time Warner to increase profits, while at the same time not having to worry about updating their (possibly outdated) internet lines. Rather than dealing with the expanding digital media age, Time Warner is profiting from it, by charging more to customers who make the most use of their service.

It's times like this when I wish there weren't local monopolies on televison/telephone providers. (Though to be fair, Verizon's FIOS service, which has been very slow to expand, is beginning to provide some customers with an alternative to cable internet).