This does not bode well for those of us who derive our living from building and maintaining websites… Time Warner Cable is conducting a trial on setting high-speed internet charges based on usage.

The company, the second-largest cable provider in the United States, will start a trial in Beaumont, Texas, in which it will sell new Internet customers tiered levels of service based on how much data they download per month, rather than the usual fixed-price packages with unlimited downloads.

Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network performance by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. Dudley said that a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity.

This also doesnt look too promising for regular people. As the internet grows and becomes faster, video delivery  is becoming more and more popular.

Could this mean a return to more basic, less graphical and lower bandwidth websites? Time will tell, but if this kind of pricing does push ahead, which I suspect it might, we may see something of a reversal of website size.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Basic Rants and Raves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.