Time Warner Cable is the second-largest cable company behind Comcast in the States, and they’re testing a new tiered pricing broadband structure that could cost more for gamers and high-bandwidth Internet users.

Basically Time Warner was to offer uncapped “Turbo” Internet access for $150, while adding “tiered” Internet access, each with bandwidth caps.

The new tiers would be as follows:

1. A 1 GB per month tier offering speeds of 768 Kbytes downstream/128 Kbytes upstream and costing $15 USD per month. Overage charges will be an extremely expensive $2 per GB per month. Landel Hobbs, Time Warner COO, said about 30 percent of all TWC users use less than 1 GB per month in total bandwidth.
2. “Road Runner Lite, Basic, Standard and Turbo packages will include expanded bandwidth caps to 10, 20, 40 and 60 GB, respectively, for the same price. Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.”
3. A 100GB capped Road Runner Turbo package which offers 10MB down/1MB up for $75 USD per month. Overage charges cost $1 per GB. For all tiers, overages are capped at $75 USD per month, which means “that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds,” Hobbs concluded.

This move has drawn criticism from all sides, and Time Warner has indicated a willingness to listen to its consumers at the end of the week.

I think this is a dumb move and would cost Time Warner more in the end.