Every additional Gigabyte that will be transferred will be billed with $1 which could spill trouble for Youtube addicts or users whose Internet connection gets hacked. The interesting question is obviously why. Why are they testing metered bandwidth plans when the whole world, and most part of the United States, are going in the other direction.

Bandwidth demands are still rising globally which can be largely attributed to video portals who slowly but steadily raise the resolution of their videos but also file sharing, multimedia distribution and gaming.

Back to the why and the consequences. Cable Internet is limited by design which is probably the main reason why a company like Time Warner wants to reduce the bandwidth consumption of everyone using their lines to be able to squeeze more users into the existing hardware and offer everyone a better experience by reducing the chance that someone else is using most of the bandwidth on the shared line.

This in turn however means that users who have the financial means will be able to experience the Internet to its fullest while users with less financial resources will be left in the dark, so to speak.

It will be interesting to see if metered bandwidth will spread throughout the United States if the tests are successful in Texas. There is however hope. Innovation will come from other means of connecting to the Internet, for example mobile connections.

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