Broadband Heavyweights Forced to Diet?

• Posted: Wednesday, January 30, 2008
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• Author: pradhana
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• Filed under: Broadband

Broadband might be treated as a limited resource.

Just as online movie and TV viewing is getting up to speed, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) may be ready to put on the brakes.

Time Warner announced last week that it would experiment with tiered broadband subscriptions in Beaumont, TX.

Unlimited, all-you-can-eat subscriptions would be replaced with capped offerings. Download too many gigabytes worth of content, and overage fees would kick in. The announcement brought both howls of protest and serious questions about what constitutes reasonable usage.

Time Warner said the experiment is designed to reign in the 5% of its subscribers who account for half its bandwidth consumption. “This is not targeted at people who download movies from Apple,” said Alexander Dudley, spokesman for Time Warner. “This is aimed at people who use peer-to-peer networks and download terabytes.”

That stance suggests that filtering may be used to determine what type of content subscribers are downloading, separating illegal file sharing from legitimate movie downloads. Regardless, this is not just about technology and not just about one ISP. If the Beaumont experiment is successful, other ISPs will likely follow suit, while others will seek to differentiate themselves by continuing to offer unlimited data transfer.

Read more - eMarketer

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