Residential ISPs don’t work financially unless you oversell peak time full-rate bandwidth. If you do things right, you oversell at a level that your customers don’t actually slow down. Even today, you won’t have 100% of customers using 100% of their full line rate 100% of the time.
replyBack in the late 1990s we could run a couple dozen 56k lines on a 1.544 Mbps backhaul. We could have those to the same extent today, but there’s still a ratio that works fine.
Yes, yes. We know. The business environment can't be arsed to maintain it's own integrity by actually building out the capacity they want to charge for. Everyone hides behind statistical multiplexing until the actuarial pants shitting event occurs. Then it's bail out time, or "We're sorry. We used all the money for executive bonuses!"
replyBuilding out for 100% of theoretical capacity makes no sense but you can still easily accommodate the small handful of power users with plenty to spare. Most ISPs will not drop or throttle users trying to get their money's worth if it’s fiber or similar. LTE of course that’s another thing.
replyThat sort of horrible abuse only happens in areas where some provider has strict monopoly, but that’s an aberration and with Starlink’s availability there’s an upper bound nowadays.