The problem stems from a very common practice called overselling your capability. How it works is quite simple. Say your cable provider has a single OC-3 connection to the internet (155 Mbit). Say also that they also provide a 1 Mbit connection to their customers. At a 1:1 sell ratio, that is 155 customers. At 4:1, that's 620 customers, and so on. The entire premise of overselling is that all of your customers will NOT be using all their allocated bandwidth at any one time, thus overselling works and it helps a HUGE amount in keeping the costs of broadband down.

Say the cost of that OC-3 is $10000 a month. At 620 users, that amounts to $16.13 a customer. Before you run up and start screaming about that's more than you pay, there is a fairly large amount of overhead in providing a broadband connecting. CPE (customer premesis equipment), head end equipment, maintenance, and the all important profit motive come into play here and they all ARE REASONABLE.

What throws a monkey wrench into the works is when even 1/4 of their customers keep their connections saturated with downloading movies and what not. That 1/4 is now saturating the OC-3, causing EVERYONE to have crappy performance (and eventually causing the provider to get a bad name for bad performance). The providers have no choice but to push back a bit - hoping to take a bit of pressure off the OC-3 (and hopefully allowing the rest of the subscribers reasonable access to their broadband).

Besides, my God people, 100 Gig a month???? What the heck are you all downloading? There isn't that much content out there that is WORTH download in the first place! :)

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