Since I know how many of those businesses are run I'll let you in on the very obvious secret: there’s zero chance they have enough uplink to accommodate everyone using 100% of their bandwidth at the same time, and probably much less than that.

Residential network access is oversold as everything else.

The only difference with storage is there’s a theoretical maximum on how much a single person can use.

But you could just as well limit backup upload speed for similar effect. Having something about fair use in ToS is really not that different.

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cestith 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

Back 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.

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salawat 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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!"

	▲	deno 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Building 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. That 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.