There's also some aspect of how close they get to the "up to" speed during the peak times. One friend that was on Frontier's DSL out in the boonies had a 5Mbps

There's also some aspect of how close they get to the "up to" speed during the peak times. One friend that was on Frontier's DSL out in the boonies had a 5Mbps plan. At peak times, he'd be lucky to see 0.2Mbps. (And he'd be lucky to get it up to 1Mbps the rest of the time...) It's really hard to justify providing 5% of the "up to" speed at peak times as reasonable in any circumstance. In his case, Frontier's answer was to tell him to upgrade to their ~10Mbps plan if his speed wasn't enough. Never mind that they already weren't delivering what he paid for. After several complaints to the AG's office and other regulators, he eventually was in touch with an engineer that just told him flat out that the node he was on was already oversold by many hundreds of percent and there was just no way he'd ever see any promised speed. So it wasn't even a case of Frontier thinking they had a realistic chance of ever delivering the speed they had sold and dealing with fluctuations in demand. They very clearly sold a product that they never expected to deliver.