In a bold move that will probably cost them a large portion of their informed customer base, Time Warner cable is going to add a bandwidth cap to their internet services. Essentially, once you exceed your bandwidth for the month, the meter starts running. And since the allocated amounts for each user’s bandwidth each month are, lets face it, kinda low, this looks to be a huge cash cow for TW until people start realizing what’s going on. So what can you do with 40GB?

The latest story is: TW will have 4 levels, ranging from 5 GB to 40 GB a month. This really isn’t that much anymore, since more and more people are streaming movies and high-def content through their internet connections. What’s even more frightening is that while they are the first to say that they’ll charge for overages, TW isn’t the only one looking at this. AT&T is conducting their own trials, and of course Comcast has that 250GB per month cap. The difference is of course, if you go over with Comcast, they give you a phone call. Time Warner just starts the clock. Also that Comcast’s cap is eight times the size of TW’s.

So how many people just ran to the phone to change to a new provider? If you didn’t… consider it.

[Via Reddit]