Exactly. The "equal traffic" concept totally fails for consumer last mile providers. In fact, it's technically more expensive for them to provide symmetrical

Exactly. The "equal traffic" concept totally fails for consumer last mile providers. In fact, it's technically more expensive for them to provide symmetrical service due to head end noise, but it also fits with their "you're supposed to consume content, especially ours, not supply it" attitude. The latter is something that more people ought to be thinking about, consumers using Netflix are not just consuming more peak bandwidth, they're competing with the video offerings of all of the big last mile providers. Although. AT&T doesn't actually offer U-verse video service to very many of their subscribers; don't know about Verizon's FiOS vs. plain DSL offerings (except that they're shedding small population states and markets as fast as they can), but the others are cable companies so they obviously do.