>moving bits does require physical materials which are limited Physical materials limit concurrent throughput, not monthly transfer. ISPs oversell their throug

>moving bits does require physical materials which are limited Physical materials limit concurrent throughput, not monthly transfer. ISPs oversell their throughput and then hope that monthly transfer limits will dissuade users from actually saturating "their" bandwidth too often. The honest strategy here is to sell much lower throughput links such that everyone gets to saturate theirs 24x7 without causing problems for anyone else. Such an option might make BitTorrent users happy, but we live in a streaming world now - most consumers seem to want bursts of extremely high bandwidth followed by hours of nothing. VPS providers have substantially the same problem with RAM, and for a time their approach was to state the baseline and "burstable" RAM of a given price point separately.