[saintfire]

I think an important consideration is that the overall grid is not designed for all houses to have the higher capacity connections. So enough connections and they're forced to make massive changes to the infrastructure.

Not to say utility companies don't make obscene profits instead of reinvesting much of that into the infrastructure.

Regarding the ISP, its really the same argument. If I want 2GB/s on a neighbourhood line that supports a max avg service size of 1GB/s then they would be forced to upgrade their lines to service me. Granted, unlike power grids they're liable to just not do that and let service quality degrade and quote the "Up to X Gbps" clause