Thursday, November 19, 1998

Internet providers setting Web time limits

By Mark P. Couch

Knight Ridder Newspapers

Some of the nation's biggest Internet service providers are capping the amount of time customers can spend surfing the Web.

GTE Internetworking is the latest large Internet service provider to announce limits. Beginning Nov. 1, GTE subscribers will pay $1 an hour for each hour they exceed their monthly 100-hour limit.

The change is designed to weed out bandwidth hogs who log on to the Internet and take valuable space in the limited wire space connecting customers to the worldwide network of computers.

According to GTE, 5 percent of its 360,000 customers spend more than 100 hours a month on the Internet, so the cap will affect fewer than 18,000 customers. The average customer uses the Internet less than 25 hours a month, the company said.

Customers received postcards and e-mail messages this month about the impending change.

Some customers are angry about the new billing structure.

Chris Cowan, a GTE customer in Denton, criticized the company for installing the cap without offering to educate consumers as to why they should spend less time online.

Alan Hicks, a disabled Vietnam veteran who lives in Newberg, Ore., said he spends about 400 hours a month online and GTE's service would be unaffordable at its new rate.

"The Internet is the primary way I can socialize with other people," said Hicks, who has since signed up with another Internet service provider and switched his long-distance service from GTE to another carrier.

Hicks' situation is quite different from most of the GTE users who are taking up bandwidth, said Alex Coleman, vice president for GTE Internetworking. Some customers log on and walk away from their computers, he said.

Coleman said that the 5 percent of customers who were online more than 100 hours accounted for 60 percent of the usage of GTE's Internet service. That caused some other customers to get busy signals when they tried to access their Internet accounts.

"We began to get a lot of complaints from customers who couldn't get through," Coleman said. "This is a quality move by us and for our customers."

GTE plans to help customers track their time online with an account meter that they can access through a password.

GTE isn't the first to impose time limits.

AT&T's WorldNet service imposed limits in March and MCI's consumer Internet division, which is now owned by Cable & Wireless, put a cap on access in July.

In August, Pacific Bell began charging an hourly rate for customers exceeding 150 hours a month. Pac Bell's sister company, Southwestern Bell Internet Services, also charges $1.80 an hour for exceeding 150 hours per month.

The trend is likely to continue, said Zia Daniell, an analyst for Jupiter Communications in New York.

"We see a lot of ISPs moving in that direction because there's not enough bandwidth out there," Daniell said.

The extra charge is clearly designed to discourage people from camping online, Daniell said. New technology like high-speed phone lines and cable modems could make the extra hourly charges irrelevant, she said.

America Online, the nation's largest Internet service provider, offers unlimited access to the Internet and doesn't plan to impose a cap.

"Our members told us by an overwhelming margin that they want unlimited access," said Wendy Goldberg, AOL spokeswoman. "When they get on the Internet they want to surf. They don't want to watch the clock."

AOL believes that caps would interfere with the burgeoning popularity of the Net. The average AOL member is online between 45 and 50 minutes a day, Goldberg said. In August 1996, the average time online was 14 minutes.

"People are integrating the Internet into their everyday lives," Goldberg said.

To keep up with its growing membership and the extra time its customers spend online, AOL is adding 20,000 to 25,000 modems every month, Goldberg said.

(c) 1998, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.