Metered Broadband Comes to Town

Tiered pricing for bandwidth is coming to my hometown of Greensboro, NC, and people are Very Unhappy.

Time Warner Cable's 5-gig threshold seems awfully low to me -- see the usage chart at the link above -- and the implications for businesses could be bad if consumers face tight restrictions on usage.

But is tiered pricing itself an unreasonable idea?

A lot of people think so. Read the comments beneath the linked article, and at my personal blog.

Some users think that a service that has been flat-priced must remain so. I'd disagree on that one. Others argue that TWC is gaming the system to sell its own services. That I need to research.

But video really is changing the game, and there's a real last-mile problem. Consumers should fight back, but they should recognize the truth, too.