This would be equal to force search engine providers to block a full country from appearing in the search index because some domains with the country extension were found to contain child pornography. A highly disproportional move by the Internet Service Providers. Time Warner made the decision to discontinue their Usenet service completely while Sprint / Verizon is blocking the complete alt hierarchy.

The alt hierarchy is known to be the group with the largest bandwidth requirements and it could be that the ISPs saw this as a welcome initiative to reduce their bandwidth costs.

Giganews, my Usenet provider of choice, is offering specials for Time Warner and Sprint / Verizon customers who would like to keep uncensored Usenet access.

Time Warner and Sprint / Verizon customers get 50% off of Diamond access and 20% of every other plan in the first month which is probably a good way to test the excellent service provided by Giganews. I’m a customer for more than 2 years and never looked back to other Usenet providers. Unparalleled in retention (200 days), speed and security in my opinion.

Members must click on the Free Trial link on the above landing pages and sign up with a valid Time Warner / Sprint / Verizon email address to receive the special.

I just realized that they added another ten connections to my Diamond subscription which means I get 20 simultaneous connections now. Speed is already maxed out with ten connections though, and that is 16 Mbit per second.

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.

I know that some users prefer those accounts however because they save a few bucks when signing up for limited accounts and since they only check emails and visit websites that’s all they need.

A leaked memo from Time Warner suggests that they will trial bandwidth caps meaning that users have to choose from a tiered structure that will certainly confuse normal customers especially when you consider that every user would have to keep track of the bandwidth already used to avoid being charged if he goes over the limit.

My personal opinion is that these tests will come to the conclusion that customers will not accept this tiered structure. It has become a way of life to access the Internet freely without having to look at bandwidth or time limits.

It does make perfectly sense from a companies point of view though. Users pick a bandwidth plan and one of two things will happen. Users remain below the allowed bandwidth which means that Time Warner is making more money because of the difference between paid for and used bandwidth.

The other scenario is that users will use more bandwidth than they paid for which would surely mean a heavy fine per Gigabyte that they exceeded their limit. Again, a win for Time Warner.

via Arstechnica