Time Warner Cable announced on Wednesday that it would test a new way of charging its high-speed Internet users. The company is planning to charge its subscribers based on their amount of usage than a flat fee, which is the standard industry practice at the moment.

Time Warner Cable is the United States’ second largest cable operator, having almost 7.4 million residential Internet subscribers. The company said that it would first test the new consumption-based billing system in Beaumont, Texas and only if the test’s results prove positive, the system will be introduced nationwide.

The pay-per-download monthly pricing system will be introduced in Beaumont later this year and it represents only a part of Time Warner Cable’s strategy to help reduce congestion of its network by some heavy users that pay the same fee as light consumers. According to the cable operator, the new billing system should impact only heavy consumers, who represent only 5 percent of all the company’s users. However, it is these consumers that typically use more than half of Time Warner Cable’s network bandwidth.

Network congestion represents a more and more serious problem for Time Warner Cable, taking into account that video downloading becomes very popular among many users. Still, the company’s plan of changing the charging system might prove controversial and risky.