Next they will use that as a standard for people that don't have broadband or the broadband availability rate.
I want them to come out with a throttling regulation for broadband. I want to see big fat fines for failure to provide broadband that they promised and force them to put certain guarantees in the contracts. I see too much of up to xx amount of bandwidth. I want to see a guarantee in writing the bandwidth will always meet a specific minimum with no interruptions.
I do realize that often it is a company's server that slows traffic down.
Oh, you can get that today.
Just be prepared to pay 10x or more over your residential contract to get it.
ALL ISPs underprovision. Their backbones can't handle everyone's connection at maximum speed. What they'll do is provision for likely use cases for an area. So if your neighborhood is expected to have 60% penetration, they'll use that and then figure on average that maybe 1 in 4 users are utilizing their connection at max and also determine what the typical package is customers are using. So if it is 25Mbps up and 3Mbps down and 100 people in a neighborhood. That gets them 60 customers, of those 20 will be hammering their connection (when averaged out) times 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up gets them 1Gbps down and 60Mbps up of bandwidth they need the local node to be able to supply.
They'll overprovision based on their numbers some, either for future speed increases, or possible customer growth or whatever. However, that doesn't mean that occasionally you won't see significantly more customers on at one time.
It also depends heavily on the technology in employ. A number of FttH technologies, the fiber runs all the way back to the local office miles away, and not to a local node. In those cases you have a big fat pipe back to the office that then has a massive pipe to the fiber ring (or whatever topology they are using) that might have hundreds of gigabits to terabits of capacity from the local office the to the rest of the ISPs network and then out to the internet at the ISPs edge.
Where as cable especially is generally FttN (Fiber to the Node), where it is more difficult to build a backhaul from each neighborhood node back to the local office. Or the fact that you might have coax from the local box to a main node.
Its been a few years, but when I was on cable, off hours I could easily hit the numbers Comcast told me I could "get up to". During the busy parts of the day, not so much. I could generally get 60-80% downstream and 50-70% upstream.
With Verizon FIOS, I've never seen a real slow down (I generally get 110% down and 125% up on what they claim I should get up to. I've never seen it dip below 105% and 80% respectively and is almost always at the 110/125% figures).
The issue with mandating capacity always be available is that most ISPs don't have the capacity. Which means you get your speeds cut way down so that everyone is guaranteed the capacity they pay for, with LOTS of idle capacity, or else the ISP has to massively expand their backbones.
Honestly I'd rather see ISPs be required to state what their MINIMUM guaranteed capacity is as well as an up to number. So if you are paying for a 25/3, the ISP might say you can get up to 25/3, but you are guaranteed a minimum of 15/2 or something. That way you have SOME recourse to either jump contract (like you'll probably have an alternative, sigh) or else obligate them to FIX the problem (whether it is expanding capacity, fixing an issue at the curb/house/etc.)
