Warner To Charge For Net Access Based on Usage

An anonymous reader writes "Wired has an AP report on new plans coming from Time Warner's cable service. The company is going to start up a flagship program in Texas later this year, testing out a tiered service for internet access based on user impact on the network. '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. Dudley said he did not know what the pricing tiers would be nor the download limits. He said the heavy users were likely using the network to download large amounts of video, most likely in high definition.'"