[bradleyland]

From a technical standpoint, that's not all that far-fetched. AT&T is delivering to the last mile. The fiber runs to the node, which feeds households over VDSL (copper pairs). Each node serves hundreds of households, so if you happen to be on a node with one of these people that are eating 20% of the total bandwidth passing through that node, you may see the impact on your connection. There's only so much pipe.

This moves the argument up the chain a little bit. Why did AT&T implement fiber-to-the-node after they were given billions upon billions of tax breaks and subsidies? Verizon implemented fiber-to-the-premisis in some markets at least.