Its what happens when you get regulators who are clueless or allow themselves to be lobbied by telcos.
Its the same shit that allows large telcos like BT in the UK to get away with product definitions that have more holes than a slice of swiss cheese.
For example, in BT's world, as long as 50% of customers at peak time (8–10pm) are achieving "in-spec" average download speeds then everything is fine.
Or another BT example, their "Stay Fast Guarantee for Full Fibre" which gets carefully reworded more often than the seasons and is also full of swiss cheese. What does their current table look like ?
- Full Fibre 100 100Mpbs down/10Mbps up
- Full Fibre 300 150Mbps down/10Mbps up
- Full Fibre 500 250Mpbs down/10Mbps up
- Full Fibre 900 700Mbps down/10Mbps up
So, as long as you're getting 50% of your line speed on 300/500 or 70% of your line speed on 900 and 10Mb upload there's nothing wrong as far as BT are concerned. And that's assuming, of course, you don't fall into the other parts of BT's swiss cheese such as the "50% of customers" noted above.