The rest of the IT industry, from entertainment brought to the home, or IT infrastructures brought to large corporations focus on “on-demand” services, a term coined not so long ago by IBM. ”On-Demand” often refers to the pay-per-use concept which is applied to utilities such as electricity, water, gas, whereby you pay what you use, no more, no less.
At home, things such as pay-per-view, online movie rentals, and others are considered on-demand items. The concept of on-demand has been difficult for many companies to implement due to the additional burden placed on the provider to plan appropriately over large quantities of users. So instead of planning appropriately, many providers, particularly in the cell phone industry use the overage system whereby the onus is on the individual consumer to select an plan that they will use and any minute above the basic plan and the rates are exponentially expensive.
Time Warner Cable’s origins are primarily in the entertainment industry so one would assume that they would understand the concept of on-demand, the idea that the client pays for the entertainment they receive. When the company announced that its Time Warner Cable business was implement “metering”, most of us thought that it would support a pay per use concept beneficial to end users. Instead, the details revealed something quite different.
According to the Associated Press, Time Warner Cable is starting trials with
metering the internet use of its customers. Customers will have choices between services starting at 768Kb per second with a max of 5 Gigabit per month and topping at 15Mb per second with a max of 40 Gigabit per month. Once the plan is selected, the users will be charged for any overage in addition to their allowance.
Keep in mind that a movie downloaded from the internet can start at 1.5Gb all the way to 7 or 8 for High-Definition movies. With this plan, even a heavy user would be limited in terms of gaming, movies, streaming audio, and many other features that the internet today brings into the home.
With this restriction, we strongly recommend users and customers of Time Warner Cable evaluate their plan carefully. If you are a user that may require more than their maximum, options should be evaluated with diligence.
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