Agreed, everybody loves the idea of fixed allocation, but never seem to consider how much that costs. If you could buy overprovisioned 25mbps @ $50/mo, or fixed allocation 25mbps @ $5,000/mo, which do you think most people would go for...
PS: Don't forget back haul is actually a relatively minor cost for most ISP's. Until it hits ~20% it's just not going to have a major impact on peoples bills.
Honestly, this is like car company's advertising their top speed when dropped from an aircraft and then complaining when they need to list actual horsepower.
If my ISP was going to tell me either the limit they cap me at and the speed the can guarantee me at 100% use, I'd pick the former.
As it stands an ISP can advertise 100 mbps service and fail to show Netflix streams when a 10 mbps connection on another ISP can easily handle 2 of them in HD. Thus, consumers need something meaningful.
PS: Picture trying to compare gas MPG if car companies could report MPG while costing down the side of a mountain. That's a perfect recipe for Honda to optimize the wrong things just like ISP's do now.
This is not a technical problem, but a business decision. The at only solution is to vote with your wallet and chose an ISP that sucks less.
So fixed costs all around.
No it wasn't. The thread starter discussed how broadband connections should be marketed, and the suggestion was to use guaranteed bandwidth as a measure.
This then digressed into the cost of bandwidth, where one poster took it totally off the rails by assuming transit costs $25 per Mbps, when the true cost is two decades lower.
The fixed cost of providing guaranteed bandwidth in the last mile pales compared to costs like $25 per Mbps, which was my point. The last mile is a fixed cost and even high amounts of guaranteed bandwidth in the last mile are fixed costs which are easily covered by the monthly subscription fee.
That does not mean that the fixed costs are free or low by absolute dollar terms.
So there.