While this argument sells to the crowd, it's facile and doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It does hold up, the math is all there. However what it does NOT provide

While this argument sells to the crowd, it's facile and doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It does hold up, the math is all there. However what it does NOT provide is much room for burst capacity. What I am saying is that the carriers could simply set reasonable expectations, and provide the consumer the option to choose what kind of connection to the Internet they wanted. They might even be able to provide priority routing to a specific content provider, if that became worthwhile in the future. IE: You can get a 15Mbps burstable connection for $50/mo. For this you might get 15Mbps, or you might get 6Mbps, but we'll guarantee you never get less than 2.5Mbps. It might also be a 95th% style billing scheme. You can get a 5/5 symmetrical dedicated connection for $65/mo. We might even be nice and let you burst to 8Mbps if the capacity is there, but you'll never get less than 5Mbps, and you'd likely never get more than 8 either. For an extra $10/mo on either plan you can have a "friends and family" routing concept where any traffic to the content provider of your choice (Hulu or Yahoo or Google, etc.) is guaranteed to never be less than 4Mbps. Instead, it appears that what they are driving at is selling you a gob of bandwidth for $x/mo., unless you want to use that gob to connect to a business deemed a competitor or threat, then it's 2x.