The Net Meter Is Running.(The Technologist)(Time Warner Cable's Road Runner broadband service testing in texas)

Byline: Steven Levy

Pity the internet-crazy movie lover in Beaumont, Texas. Time Warner Cable's Road Runner broadband service has chosen your city for an experiment. If you're signing up to watch lots of high-definition flicks using, say, the new iTunes digital rental program announced last month, start saving now, because TW is going to tally up all those gigabytes. You know that feeling mobile-phone users get when they exceed their allotted minutes and get a heart-stopping tariff for overage? Beaumont cinephiles could get the same infarction from their Road Runner bills.

The experiment doesn't mean that the rest of us will soon see a dramatic change in Internet fees; no other providers have indicated they'll adopt the scheme. But the move illuminates some of the troubling issues facing the United States, which is ranked 24th in the world in Internet penetration--behind Estonia.

Time Warner's plan was leaked by an internal memo that the company has since confirmed. The reason for the change, spokesman Alex Dudley says, is that some users are unfairly piling up gigabytes of goodies on their digital plates. "As few as 5 percent of our customers use 50 percent of the network," he says; one glutton downloaded the equivalent of 1,500 movies in a month.

It sounds reasonable for Time Warner to ask big-time freeloaders to pay their way. But talking to Dudley, I get the impression that it won't just be flagrant overindulgers who wind up paying more. Indeed, he acknowledges that TW hopes such a plan will get all its customers thinking about how much media they consume on the Net. Currently, TW envisions offering plans capped at 5, 10, 20 and 40 gigabytes. Five gigs gets you barely two movies and a couple of TV shows. Clearly, it won't just be inductees to the LimeWire Hall of Fame who are hit with excess charges.

Those penalties could be rough. Bell Canada, which meters service in some plans, charges customers who go over the ...