Stuart Corner
Monday, 21 January 2008 00:06
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
IT news sites in the US have been running hot over the past few days with reports that Time Warner Cable is about to trial usage-based billing for its broadband services, including monthly download caps that could be "only 5GB per month." These developments are just the harbinger of bigger changes to come.
To Australian Internet users accustomed to download caps starting at a mere 200MB per month that might seem quite generous, but in a land where customers are not used to such impositions it has, predictably created a storm of protest from customers, lobby groups and there are reports that the regulators are also investigating.
DSLReports.com, which
broke the story, got its hands on an internal Time Warner memo, in which Time Warner said the move was aimed at generating additional revenue from "the five percent of subscribers who utilise over half of the total network bandwidth."
Initially the report said, the limitations would be imposed on new customers only but could be applied to existing customers down the track. DSL reports added:" while true per-byte billing may never come to the US market, 'overage' charges are a very real possibility. The problem has been that such systems haven't proven particularly reliable. Canadian provider Rogers has some very low caps in comparison to US providers, ranging from 10GB to 75GB. They've been trying to charge customers cap overage fees, but haven't been able to implement reliable tracking mechanisms." Funny that, Australian ISPs have no problem.
The main reason for the policy shift is peer-to-peer video traffic and video downloads, and it is a problem not unique to the US. According to Optus over 90 percent of the traffic on its Internet link to US at night during off-peak times is peer-to-peer. Another Australian ISP, Internode, recently jacked up prices for this highest download plans saying that most of the users on these were driving them to the limit.
This situation can only get worse: especially if the Apple video download service takes off, just launched in the US, takes off like iTunes and iPod before it did. Already YouTube is reported to accont for 20 percent of Internet traffic.
