this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2026
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All residential ISPs are over subscribed. If they could provide the full bandwidth to all of their customers simultaneously, then most of that bandwidth would go unused.
Well yeah, but there are different kinds of oversubscription. There's the one that makes still sense, because you only run into bandwidth issues on special occasions or short periods during the times with the heaviest loads, and there's the other that is powered by greed and leads to a permanent lack of bandwidth.
Didn't seem like such an issue during COVID when everyone was home 24/7 using their internet. Comcast likes to make this same claim but somehow their network didnt collapse during that time. I understand that cell towers have an upper limit on connections but I dont believe for a second that most are currently operating near their limit. Furthermore, nobody is forcing TMobile, Verizon, or anyone else to advertise their plans as "unlimited" if, as they claim, they aren't able to handle the traffic.
That's why I said the average daily maximum of traffic should be the determining factor here
That gives wiggle room for the GtA6 launch, but it means everyone gets the advertised speed. And if they're not, the company can refund the difference to affected customers each month
I realize they're oversubscribed, but that's exactly the problem. They are not investing properly in infrastructure
But companies hate nothing more than leaving money on the table. It makes their numbers look absolutely offensive to business/finance types... So my suggestion would realign the incentives in a way that would make them proactively expand/upgrade the network as needed
But it also doesn't mean they have to build out a ton of unnessesary bandwidth - they would just have to meet actual peak demand
With basic traffic analysis and statistics, they could easily stay ahead of this
And also that would make residential connections expensive as hell and waste resources on every step on the network. I'm on a relatively small ISP but still have symmetric 1Gbps connection. If every customer even on this small ISP had their full bandwidth available to everything all the time they'd need at least several Tbps combined capacity which would take considerable chunk of all the capacity we have on the whole country to abroad just to serve few thousand houses.