Last year, Time Warner Cable set up trials to cap users on their bandwidth usage in order to charge customers based on how much they download. Time Warner CEO, Glenn Britt claimed that the new pricing model is necessary to support the broadband business and that it was their ‘mistake’ for not having done so from the beginning.

However, it has yet to be proven that cable companies have a real financial need to enforce a pricing plan based on bandwidth consumption. Bandwidth is inexpensive and its costs continue to go down. While international bandwidth has increased by 66 percent, the cost has decreased by 22 percent. Big ISPs’ peered connections with other giant ISPs are not subjected to per-bit cost. Cables running in the grounds are already placed and hardware upgrades are relatively cheap. Since most Internet costs are fixed, why is a new consumption pricing necessary?

Free Press’ research director, S. Derek Turner suggests that the consumption based pricing is derived from greed for increased profits.

"This is nothing more than greed," says Turner. "The industry may be maturing, and therefore margins aren't rapidly increasing the way they were."

Read more on consumption based pricing at arstechnica.