TW Cable to adjust Net pricing

Time Warner Cable Inc. will experiment with a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access this year, charging customers based on how much data they download, a company spokesman said Wednesday.

The nation’s second-largest cable provider will start a trial in Beaumont, Texas, in which it will sell new Internet customers tiered levels of service based on how much data they download per month, rather than the usual fixed-price packages with unlimited downloads.

Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network’s performance by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. He said a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, about 5% of the customer base, could account for as much as 50% of network capacity.

Dudley said he didn’t know what the pricing tiers would be nor the download limits. He said the heavy users probably were using the network to download large amounts of video, most likely in high definition.

It was not clear when the trial would begin, but Dudley said it would probably be in the second quarter.