Pay Per Gig

From washingtonpost.com - Technology:

If you are an Internet-crazy movie lover in Beaumont, Tex., life may soon take a miserable turn for you. Time Warner Cable, which also sells broadband via its Road Runner service, has chosen your city for a pricing experiment. If you have plans to sign up and watch lots of high-definition flicks using, say, the new iTunes digital rental program announced last month, start saving now, because Time Warner is going to tally up those gigabytes. You know that feeling that mobile phone users get when they exceed their allotted minutes and get a heart-stopping tariff for overage charges? Some Beaumont cinephiles could get the same infarction from their Road Runner bills. The experiment doesn't necessarily mean the rest of us will soon see a dramatic change in the way we pay for our broadband Internet; cable giant Comcast says it's also evaluating the concept, but other broadband providers aren't indicating they'll adopt the scheme. (They all have their own ideas, though, about getting returns on their broadband investments.) But Time Warner's move illuminates some of the troubling issues facing the United States in the Internet era, where, in terms of penetration, we are in 24th place -- behind Estonia -- in the international broadband competition.

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