June 18, 2008 | Online

Downloading costs to increase

Internet service providers ((ISPs) want to start rather than the standard flat fee, meaning all those videos you've been downloading legally (ahem) may end up costing you more.

Time Warner Cable is already experimenting with “Internet metering”, where consumers pay for a monthly bandwidth allowance and incur additional surcharges if they exceed their limit. AT&T admitted that  "based on current trends, total bandwidth in the AT&T network will increase by four times over the next three years,” so asking heavy users to pay more simply makes sense. And Comcast already slows down the connections of their heaviest users -- called bandwidth hogs -- during peak times.

Why? The ISPs say it's an issue of fairness: Why should someone who checks their e-mail twice daily be forced to pay the same as someone who file-shares videos and chats on Skype all day long. It's also about sustainability: with so many people moving huge files over the network, the system becomes clogged and slower for everyone.

"Average customers are way below the (proposed) caps," said Kevin Leddy, executive vice president for advanced technology at Time Warner Cable. "These caps give them years' worth of growth before they'd ever pay any surcharges."

Critics aren't convinced, arguing that metering and capping network use will hold back the convergence of television, computers and the Internet. [more]

“As soon as you put serious uncertainty as to cost on the table, people’s feeling of freedom to predict cost dries up and so does innovation and trying new applications,” Vint Cerf known as the 'father of the Internet' countered in an e-mail message. 

And businesses that are increasingly dependent on providing content online to turn a profit, such as porn sites, worry that customers will be scared away for fear of going over their alotted minutes. In Beumont, Texas, Time Warner is offering new customers metering plans which max out at 40 Gigabytes for $50 a month. At that point customers pay $1 per Gigabyte.  Given than high-quality porn video scenes can be 200-300 Megabytes in size, that would still allow for a couple hundred video scenes to be downloaded before metering kicks in.

Jim Louderback, chief executive of , a three-year-old media company that runs a Web-based television network, argues that “if all of a sudden our viewers are worried about some sort of a broadband cap, they may think twice about downloading or watching our shows.”

You better believe there'll be hell to pay if anything affects the ability to watch our favorite porn!