While I find myself disagreeing with much of what Susan has to say, the situation she describes here is the first clear article I have seen about oversubscription of broadband. As an ISP, I deal with oversubscription all the time, and it affects all networks — wireless, cable, DSL and fiber. Charter typically feeds neighborhoods with a DOCSIS node capable of delivering about 500MB. They then advertise 60MB speeds to end users. Reportedly, they will put up to 500 users on the same node, to share the 500MB of capacity. That is a 60:1 oversubscription ratio. At my ISP, we find that exceeding 10:1 will cause noticeable issues and exceeding 15:1 will show a fair amount of degradation to end users. Unfortunately, this is not a problem that is unique to cable companies. Wireless, especially mobile wireless, is very prone to oversubscription problems and fiber is also affected. City and Municipal owned networks don’t get a pass either. The business models don’t work without some degree of oversubscription, and many of the muni networks have heavily oversubscribed middle-mile connections (think selling gigabit fiber to hundreds of customers and feeding it with a single gigabit backbone connection). Regulation doesn’t resolve this problem, as it is a moving target and the larger corporate ISPs refuse to talk about it. The only answer is more competition — and not just from city and muni owned networks. Over the next few years, millimeter wave fixed wireless is poised to make huge inroads into this issue, and the business model is not easily defeated by the monopolists.