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You see, no one in their right mind is actually allowing the typical residential end user to pay for bandwidth. They simply allow them to pay for ACCESS to potential bandwidth. Basically meaning that at first you will get great bandwidth via your DSL subscription, but over time there will be changes. Bandwidth caps, port blocking, IP address rotation. The intent is to keep people from actually using their bandwidth to run any kind of server at home. In essence this typ of account (for typically more than double the typical 56K unlimited access account) is for web browsing and will never be anything more. A rather crappy marketing ploy to sell something they do not have (bandwidth) to people who want it. If you inquire about guaranteed bandwidth, suddenly you are looking at rates that surpass ISDN for actual, real bandwidth.

I can hear people screaming now, "But if you want bandwidth, you have to pay for it." And I agree with this. My argument was never that bandwidth should be guaranteed, but that true, high bandwidth connections won't be limited by the "last-mile" to the end users house. In fact, since companies selling broadband access are so limited on what they can get guaranteed from a Telco, they also can not give true broadband access to the residential user. The bottleneck is the lack of bandwidth infrastructure inside the Telcos, not the lack of high speed connection to the residential area.

since june 7 1999