Frontier: Heavy Internet users to pay more

Phone company Frontier Communications will probably charge its subscribers a dollar or two per gigabyte of Internet traffic if they go over the monthly allotments the company plans to introduce next year, Frontier's chief executive said Friday. The company is at the forefront of what CEO Maggie Wilderotter believes is a trend among Internet service providers toward billing for the amount of data subscribers use, rather than all-you-can-eat monthly plans. Frontier provides service mainly in rural areas of 25 states. Internet users have no experience with tracking their usage. There have been few caps in place on downloads, and the existing caps have been so high that they affected only a tiny fraction of users. Frontier's planned cap would apply to the total amount of data that users download and upload in a given month. A traffic allowance of 5 gigabytes is enough for thousands of Web pages, or tens of thousands of e-mails, but could be exceeded by the download of three DVD-quality movies.