14 DAY TRIAL // The second largest cable provider in the United States has decided that the taxation employed to this day was actually not the best possible, so it announced through the voice of Alex Dudley, its spokesperson, that a new one will be implemented.
The new taxation method will first be tested in Beaumont, Texas, and it will provide the company's Internet customers with several levels of pricing, depending on how much they download rather than having one unlimited download service package.
According to Associated Press, Dudley said that the trial was aimed at improving the network performance by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. The impression that I, as an Internet user, am left with after reading the above is that heavy use is being made more costly because it is a bad thing, which decreases the performance level of the network. I don't think that should be the case, despite what he said next, that a small group of super heavy users of downloads, roughly 5 percent of Time Warner's customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity.
Now don't get me wrong, I agree with the measure from the cable provider. What I strongly disagree is the tone the announcement was made. Alex Dudley assumed that the heavy users were most likely using the network to download large amounts of video, probably in high definition, according to AP.
The trial period is most likely to start somewhere around the beginning of the second quarter of 2008, but further details about the actual levels of pricing and what the download limit for each tier will be were not disclosed. Also, the target of the test are not customers already with Time Warner, but new ones to register.