This is really dumb. Firstly, I'd bet dollars to donuts that his ISP advertises "up to" a certain speed and includes language in the T&Cs that specifies speeds

This is really dumb. Firstly, I'd bet dollars to donuts that his ISP advertises "up to" a certain speed and includes language in the T&Cs that specifies speeds may vary based on a variety of factors. Secondly, is this even taking network overheads into account? Thirdly, saying "kids in Africa might have 14kB/s for their whole connection, therefore that amount of bandwidth is worth fighting for" is dumb because it assumes constant marginal utility of bandwidth when that's obviously not the case. Going from 0kB/s to 14kB/s is a hell of a lot more valuable than going from 14kB/s to 28kB/s, and going from 14kB/s to 28kB/s is many orders of magnitude more valuable than going from 882kB/s to 896kB/s.