Cautious treading: imposing bandwidth consumption caps and tracking a customer's high-speed...

Although high-speed data has grown to become an immensely popular cable service, operators are still trying to figure out how to get more return on their investment and how to police bandwidth hogs who cost more to maintain than the monthly nut they pay.

But cable operators, for a melange of reasons, are treading into these areas as carefully as they might toe a tightrope without a net.

So far, the most common push in this direction with HSD has been in the deployment of simple speed-cap tiers, typically with a high-end version for power users, a middle-tier