"It seems that you oppose the existence of residential bandwidth plans and would prefer that ISPs only offer dedicated bandwidth plans"
Not necessarily. Like I said above, even having a certain amount of dedicated bandwidth (even as low as, say, 5Mbps) plus a burst to, say, 100+Mbps during non-peak times would be a lot better than the current situation of no guarantees at all. The exact numbers should be easy to calculate: Min = Total / NumHouses, Burst = Total.
All this is still tangential to my main point, though: of that slice of bandwidth the customer can access during peak hours, the customer - and only the customer - is the only person who should be able to decide how that slice is allocated. If my neighborhood's Internet is really busy and I'm left with 1Mbps, then I should have full control over that 1Mbps. Cable company wants to reserve some of my 1Mbps for its half-baked VoIP offering? Boo hoo; my Counterstrike takes priority.
"for the sorts of prices that residential consumers are used to paying."
Cable companies are already overcharging for Internet plans. They can do this because they have all the benefits of a public utility (namely: the local monopolies) without any of the regulation.
So no, I don't believe for one second that the cable companies can't afford to provide at least some guaranteed minimum bandwidth. They just choose not to because they can get away with it.
Not necessarily. Like I said above, even having a certain amount of dedicated bandwidth (even as low as, say, 5Mbps) plus a burst to, say, 100+Mbps during non-peak times would be a lot better than the current situation of no guarantees at all. The exact numbers should be easy to calculate: Min = Total / NumHouses, Burst = Total.
All this is still tangential to my main point, though: of that slice of bandwidth the customer can access during peak hours, the customer - and only the customer - is the only person who should be able to decide how that slice is allocated. If my neighborhood's Internet is really busy and I'm left with 1Mbps, then I should have full control over that 1Mbps. Cable company wants to reserve some of my 1Mbps for its half-baked VoIP offering? Boo hoo; my Counterstrike takes priority.
"for the sorts of prices that residential consumers are used to paying."
Cable companies are already overcharging for Internet plans. They can do this because they have all the benefits of a public utility (namely: the local monopolies) without any of the regulation.
So no, I don't believe for one second that the cable companies can't afford to provide at least some guaranteed minimum bandwidth. They just choose not to because they can get away with it.