[snuxoll]

Kind of insane to not oversubscribe residential or small/medium business connections, it's extremely rare that 100 houses would saturate a 10Gb line or even half that.

When you pay $50/mo for an internet connection you aren't paying for guaranteed bandwidth, you're just hoping the ISP has enough capacity to meet peak demand - not much different from your local electric provider.

It'd cost me roughly ~$3000/mo for a 10Gb point-to-point link from Boise to Equinix in Seattle from Zayo, and about another $2500/mo for a 10Gb transit connections from Hurricane Electric. You could serve quite a lot of households from that, 50-100:1 oversubscription is pretty common for residential/small business service - so that 10Gb connection could pretty safely serve 500 households reducing your fixed costs to $11/customer/mo.

[notyourday]

Replying again.

What we need a boatload of small regional networks ( like the one with 100 houses of HOA ) that have an open peering policy. If you can peer out 50% of your traffic at $0.01 per mbit ($100/mo PNIs to CloudFlare, JoeSchmoeNet, FLIX etc) then you have the same non-congested non-oversubscribed exit for 50% less.

[notyourday]

And this is where you are getting into some really interesting stuff:

what you want to do is be an ISP and content originator. In that case you effectively are double-selling your bandwidth since eyeball networks are bringing content in while web farms are pushing content out.

Oversubscription is a reality but it transparently works only on a very large scale - which is why Verizon and Comcast should be able to provide extremely high speed connections ( they don't due to their peering and interconnect policies but that's a separate thing ).

HE is terribly oversubscribed.