Time Warner testing usage-based billing

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Alex

But its weird how people don't mind this billing model in one area (cell phones) but the screaming is long and loud in this area.

It has to do with what the market is accustomed to combined with how the services are used.

That model has been in place for telephone use pretty much since telephones became a household thing. Pay for your call. Want to pay less, use it less.

And while internet use started like that with the portal services like AOL and Prodigy, it quickly went out of favor. My guess for the reason is that the length of time you use the internet (the old "bill for usage" model") was in many ways out of the consumer's control. It's not their fault a page took forever to load, or a download got corrupted so they had to spend the time downloading it again. That, combined with the open-ended nature of internet usage, it was simply not as easy to curtail one's use the way we're used to with phones.

So once that model went out the window, we've now had 10 years to become accustomed to unlimited use. It's hard to go back at that point. Of course, the method of determining usage amounts is different, being bandwidth instead of time connected. But some of the same arguments still apply ("Hey, is it my fault the website I chose to go to was loaded with data-intensive multimedia content"). Of course, if they balance the billing right such that general web browsing, video viewing, some itunes downloads and a Skype call or 10 during a month leaves the vast majority of users paying something close to what they are paying now, it might not be an issue. But I still think it's rather jarring to force everyone to make that mental switch from unlimited to having to monitor every kilobyte of use.