Time Warner's "Tiered" Pricing

Sometimes I really hate it when I'm right. In the last post I predicted that the pricing would give you less for more. I decided to do some searching on the "tiered" pricing from Time Warner and found this article. I wasn't quite right. You can either get more for more (faster speed for more money) or less for less, but it doesn't look like I could keep what I have now at the price I pay. Also, if you want to go straight to the source, I wish you luck on finding the pricing spelled out. I couldn't find it (and I spent way too much time looking)

Anyway, here's the pricing in a nutshell: It starts at $30 per month for 768 kilobits per second with a 5-gigabyte monthly cap called "Lite" service. (Really Time Warner? 786kbs is broadband service to you?) After that, there's three increasing levels of service ("Basic Tier" with a 10GB cap, "Standard" with a 20GB cap , and "Turbo" with a speed of 15Mbps and a 40GB cap). Anything over the cap will be billed a $1 per gigabyte.

One of the biggest problems is that these are just esoteric numbers to most people. No one knows if they need 10 or 100 gigabytes. From Time Warner's Beaumont page (where this is being tested):
What does 1 GB get you?
So you can better understand what level you should choose, 1GB gets you about 70,000 e-mails, 34 hours of gaming or 1,344 hours of Web browsing; or, it’s the approximate equivalent of downloading 569 photos, 277 music files, 7 hours of low-resolution video (YouTube), 3 hours of standard definition streaming video or 45 minutes of high-definition streaming video.

I tested some of these numbers and was surprised to see that they're fairly correct. However, I'd still be hesitant to pick a level for myself in advance. Since most PCs show network traffic in a measure of incoming and outgoing packets, it's not very helpful. However, here's a handy little utility that does monitor your usage in bytes. I installed it and here's a screenshot:
I tested it with transferring some files and it was dead on. So I suppose if I ran this program for a couple of months, I would probably be able to pick a tiered plan, but I really hope this type of pricing doesn't replace the "all I can eat" Internet buffet I currently enjoy. Not to mention that the average user isn't going to go through this much trouble. (Regardless, you can download this free program here.)

I must be suspicious by nature, because I think there's a lot more to this business model than meets the eye. First, what's going to happen to iTunes, NetFlix "Watch Instantly", Amazon Unboxed, Hulu and others? Video on demand is still in it's infancy. Does that burgeoning business get killed with this type of pricing? I actually don't think so, but NetFlix isn't going to like this theory...

Instead, I think you'll see the ISPs offering tiered pricing and they'll later offer something like their own movie and music downloads. However, any downloads from their site won't count against your monthly allowance. An advertisement could easily be sent to the user when they are near their limit directing them to the site. From my perspective, that should all be treated as illegal tying, but I doubt that would ever happen.

If you're at your monthly limit and you wanted to download a 4GB movie, it would cost you $4 extra for the extra usage under Time Warner's tiered pricing.

Think that might provide just a little inducement to buy from a the ISP's site? Just a tiny bit of an unfair competitive advantage?

I hope I'm making my point here. Net Neutrality isn't simply about how a few packets get delivered. It's ultimately about freedom of speech, freedom of choice, and money. BIG money!