[saurik]

Bandwidth over the course of seconds and bandwidth over the course of days are not comparable. If you are using the fast bandwidth provided to download a file and have it nearly instantly, that's great. It is wonderful to be able to watch YouTube videos without buffering, to get entire webpages in the blink of an eye, and to install an OS over the network without wishing you had splurged for the Cd's. But as soon as you provide something like that, you get some asshole who thinks that it is then his right to use that speed /constantly/, doing nothing but downloading files day and night. If everyone does this, there is no more bandwidth to go around: the expectation is that users will use "up to 5MB/s" only for a few seconds, not for days at a time. You might even say a fair allotment of the finite bandwidth resource might be "5MB/s, or 100MB/min, or 1GB/hour", despite those numbers not even remotely multiplying out. And this is, in fact, how many ISP's are now trying to solve the problem of people who don't understand the concept of sharing: "burst rates", where as you use bandwidth it slows down over short time spans.