Are they really promoting a floating rate that punishes users from well, using the internet? Isn't that the purpose?
This sounds like the old fashioned telephone calls charged per minute of yesteryear. When I first arrived in France everyone still paid per minute for calls and for using the internet (or minitel) but now it's difficult to find anyone who pays more than the standard flat rates per month which includes internet (fiber optic or regular broadband), phone to at least 50 countries in the world plus piles of TV stations. France Telecom, who charged per minute to landlines until very recently, led the world with compression technology (it's a country of math wizards, after all) so now with the exception of one remaining coaxial "cable" offering, everything comes through the phone lines.
It doesn't matter if you are watching TV or online, it comes through the phone lines. Charging extra for watching TV whether online or on your TV is not the future. It's the past. If a country like France can offer more competition than the US there's something seriously wrong in the US. The problem is political lobbying and not technology because obviously it exists. Washington needs to bring back the competitive environment that was thrown to the dogs during the GOP years and let the ISPs learn how to compete again. Consumers deserve it and Congress should demand it.
From MSNBC:
If Internet service providers' current experiments succeed, subscribers may end up paying for high-speed Internet based on how much material they download. Trials with such metered access, rather than the traditional monthly flat fee for unlimited connection time, offer enough bandwidth that they won't affect many consumers — yet.Time Warner Cable is now playing both sides of the debate so who knows what that's supposed to mean back on planet earth.
But as more people use the Internet to watch TV and stream movies, they could bump up against the metered rates' caps, paying expensive over-use fees. Watching a movie may then require paying two fees: one for the movie, another to the cable company.
