Heavy web users may be the pride and joy of digital marketers, but they have become a source of frustration for internet service providers like Time Warner Cable because frequent downloads often clog the data pipeline. To combat a growing infrastructure problem, the nation's second largest cable provider has said it will experiment with a tiered pricing structure for internet.

The experiment, which Time Warner will conduct in Beaumont, Texas, will allow the company to charge heavy users more money based on how much they download.

Company spokesman Alex Dudley told The New York Times that Time Warner hopes to use a tiered pricing model to ease burdens on internet infrastructure. According to Dudley, about 5 percent of Time Warner's customers account for 50 percent of the network capacity. Most of the usage can be attributed to internet video, which continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

Last October, Larry Roberts, one of the engineers who helped design ARPAnet, the predecessor to the internet, warned that video would destroy the web as we know it because the platform was not built to carry that much data.

Consumption-based billing has been a reality in other parts of the world. But so far, U.S. internet users have benefited from unfettered access to the web.