Broadband internet provider Time Warner Cable is making good on its plans to charge its subscribers for the amount of bandwidth they consume, a decision that could have a serious impact on your cable bill.
It could also have an impact on your video game buying habits, as Gamers With Jobs explores in a new article that lays out Time Warner's tiered pricing structure — and just how easy it is to rack up 50-plus gigabytes of usage.
While some of our European and Antipodean readers may be all too familiar with bandwidth caps placed upon them by their high-speed internet providers, many of us here in the Americas are blissfully ignorant of such limitations. When we're downloading single games that can eat up 13 GB of disk space (and bandwidth, natch) a 100 GB limit at the maximum tier doesn't start to look like much.
And if you regularly stream Netflix movies via your Xbox 360 or buy them from the PlayStation Store, on top of your daily Kotaku readership and whatever else it is you do with your precious internet time, one can see how quickly and easily bandwidth caps can be exceeded.
We have to wonder, beyond how this will affect our own bills, how will it impact services like Steam, GameTap and the upcoming OnLive? Factoring in spend for a download that may put one beyond their limit is surely going to have some effect on buying decisions.
With more and more content, particularly video games, being digitally distributed, the article is definitely worth a read.
The Meter Is Running [Gamers With Jobs]