When Richard Tallent moved to a new home in Beaumont, Texas, he had one worry on his mind: signing up for Internet service as soon as possible. Time Warner Cable, the local provider, had imposed a 5-gigabyte usage limit for its new customers.
Tallent, a programmer and photographer who frequently uploads large photographs, slipped in under the deadline with two days to spare. If he had not, he would have had to pay $1 for every extra gigabyte he used each month.
What Time Warner is experimenting with in Beaumont may very well be the way phone companies and cable TV companies sell Internet service in the near future. The company thinks it is not fair for the average users to subsidize the heavy users.
The Federal Communications Commission recently voted to forbid a plan by Comcast, a major U.S. provider, for slowing the service of its most voracious customers. (Comcast recently filed a lawsuit to reverse the regulator’s judgment). So the best thing to do might be to throttle the once-unlimited use of the Internet.
Customers are reacting like patients when a doctor orders a strict diet. Some are looking for tools to restrain their use of the Internet, while others are hoping to find another doctor with a more liberal attitude toward vanilla Swiss almond ice cream and prime rib.
Some Internet service providers want to end their all-you-can-eat plans because a few customers with huge appetites for Web content are overwhelming the networks and slowing the delivery of news and entertainment for everyone else.
Other providers blame copyright pirates who program their computers to crawl the Internet and suck down complete copies of music CDs or DVDs.
A few companies say the culprits clogging Internet networks are legitimate video services like YouTube.com, Hulu.com and Apple’s iTunes that use more bandwidth than the illicit file…