NEW YORK - Time Warner Cable will test a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access later this year, charging customers based on how much data they download, a company spokesman said Wednesday.
The company will start the trial in Beaumont, Texas, selling new Internet customers tiered levels of service based on how much data they download per month, rather than the usual fixed-price packages.
Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial probably will start in the second quarter of this year. The tiered pricing would affect only new customers in Beaumont. Dudley said he did not know what the pricing tiers or downloading limits would be.
Dudley said the trial is aimed at improving network performance by making service more costly for heavy users of large downloads. He said a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can consume up to 50 percent of the network's capacity.
Dudley said the heavy users probably use the network to download large amounts of video, most likely in high definition.
Time Warner Cable is the second-largest cable provider in the United States.
