Bad news for Time Warner Cable customers. According to Alley Insider, the cable firm has revealed plans to expand bandwidth usage restriction trials to more cities this year. Time Warner Cable COO Landel Hobbs reportedly broke the news during the company's fourth-quarter results call yesterday.
The trials kicked off last summer in the Beaumont, Texas area, where users have to deal with quotas ranging from 5GB to 40GB per month depending on their service tier. (Last we heard, the 40GB quota applied to the $54.90-a-month, 15Mbps service, while the 5GB limit covered the cheaper 768Kbps tier).
Folks who go over have to cough up an extra $1 per gigabyte per month, which can ramp up costs quite quickly—especially considering the increasing amount of high-definition streaming video around the web. At a full 15Mbps, it should only take about six hours of non-stop downloading to reach the 40GB limit.
