Time Warner Cable is testing usage-based broadband access pricing, according to Broadbandreports.com. The move is hardly surprising. Most Internet service providers report that a fraction of all users, about five percent or so, use over half of all access bandwidth.
The Time Warner test presumably aims to discover how such usage can be monitored by end users themselves, how scalable the process might be, and possibly whether such heavy users will upgrade to higher-usage plans or flee to another provider.
Over time, it seems inevitable that heavier users will find themselves facing universal caps on their usage and the ability to buy plans that support their higher usage levels.
Broadandreports.com says the test will involve new customers in the Beaumont market, not existing customers. Those users will be placed on metered billing plans where overage charges will apply, and provided a web site where they can track their usage and upgrade, if required.
In principle, the approach is akin to how mobile pricing plans now are structured, where users can choose higher usage or lower usage plans for voice and text usage.
One way or the other, as video becomes a bigger part of overall broadband usage, it is inevitable that usage-based plans supplant current "all you can eat" plans. Video is the reason.
Video consumes vastly more bandwidth than Web surfing, email or voice, requiring across the board capacity increases in the network backbone and access networks. That obviously costs money, and those costs will have to be recovered.
Usage-based pricing is coming because it has to.
No comments:
Post a Comment