Time Warner Cable Inc.’s internet subscribers will be submitted to a differential billing system in the future, that will start as trial period in Beaumont, Texas later this year. The idea the cable operator tried to highlight upon making the announcement on Wednesday was that it’s unfair for light users to pay just as much as consumers with substantial downloads, and it will also be a method of decongesting the network.

The U.S. cable operator is planning on taking the example of Bell Canada, which already implemented a system of 30-gigabyte bandwidth limits to its users, who are then charged $7.42 for each gigabyte downloaded when they exceed the limit. If we take a high-definition movie for example, the download will cost up to $30 since the average size is 4-5 gigabytes. The Internet providers are trying to keep up with their customers’ demands as downloading digital media over the web can be considered the latest trend.

According to a company spokesman, the plan doesn’t go as far as having a well established billing system so far, but the trial period in Beaumont will go to show what the best solution is. The basic package will probably offer as much as 40 gigabytes a month, and will not affect most of the users, except for those 5 % of heavy downloaders that account for more than half of the total network bandwidth.

Why is Time Warner Cable Inc. so eager to give green light to such a plan? Well, probably because the preferences of their customers begin to lean towards a high-definition movie they can download from the internet, rather than watch a poorer quality one on digital cable. The company spokesman told in a Reuters interview: “Largely people won’t notice the difference. We don’t want customers to feel they’re getting less for more.”