Here’s a plan reminiscent of the old dial-up Internet days that I’m not too keen on: Time Warner Cable is conducting an Internet trial in which new Beaumont, Texas, customers will have monthly allowances for the amount of data they upload and download. Web users who go over the limit will get slapped with a $1 per gigabyte charge.

Metered billing is an attempt to deal fairly with Internet usage, which is very uneven among Time Warner Cable’s subscribers, said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable’s executive vice president of advanced technology.

Just 5 percent of the company’s subscribers take up half of the capacity on local cable lines, Leddy said. Other cable Internet service providers report a similar distribution.

“We think it’s the fairest way to finance the needed investment in the infrastructure,” Leddy said.

While phone companies are unlikely to impose metered usage on DSL customers due to a different network structure, other cable providers are also looking at ways to rein in heavy users. Those of us who have cell phone are already used to monitoring the minutes we use and paying extra for going over our allowance. But will consumers accept metered Internet usage? Information-technology consultant George Ou told the FCC he doesn’t think so: “The metered Internet has been tried and tested and rejected by the consumers overwhelmingly since the days of AOL.” What do you think?