[SpaceManiac]

> purely because the internet companies are also content companies

I have no doubt this is a reason, but most ISPs also oversell their bandwidth. If every customer with a 10Mbit line is only using it 10% of the time, your upstream lines only 'need' to be 10% of 10Mbit * the number of customers (plus whatever margin for spikes).

[woah]

A 100mbit connection that is not oversold can easily run a few hundred to a thousand dollars a month.

[AnthonyMouse]

Maybe a decade ago. It's down below $50/month now from a major exchange point. Even less if you deal in larger quantities as ISPs would.

[jdietrich]

It's called contention. Typical ratios are about 20:1 - for every 20Mbits of throughput they sell to customers, they have about 1Mbit of throughput to the internet. Leased lines are uncontended, but they're also vastly more expensive than conventional broadband services.

[crankylinuxuser]

I don't care how they do contention. That's a business plan.

What I do care about is fraudulent business practices. I expect a minimum speed alongside a maximum speed. And if their contention ratio is 10:1 then I expect 1Mbit-10Mbit for that connection.

But no, the content/internet media companies play insane games, zero rating their stuff, enforcing arbitrary 'kill netflix' limits, and evil layer 7 filtering. They need broken up into lines owned by the state, service over lines sold to whomever provides service (like an ISP or a content company), and customers leasing the lines like how power works.

These megagiant media corps should have never owned the physical connections. At all.