> "Real price" is the cost of a connection that "never" slows down, because it is literally dedicated to you and only you.

So I have come to the conclusion that in part we are talking past each other. You are saying “Consider the set of people such that they need more bandwidth than is available in the pre-existing copper/fiber cabeling to the premises. In that case they need new cable/fiber. This is expensive. The fiber that they will receive is theirs alone (since, for starters, nobody else seems to need it).” Yes, that is all true.

However you are conflating this with the alternative “Anyone who does not do this shares a line with other persons and therefore can have no reasonable expectations about their level of service.” Which is not true. It is, in fact, the responsibility of the ISP to make a reasonable effort to control oversubscription. Some ISPs do not do this, of course, but the consumer is not wrong for having the expectation.

Here in Austin, we have 8x4 DOCSIS3 to the building. That’s about 340MBit/s down. If you divide that by the ten units in this building, that’s 34Mbit of (dedicated) bandwidth to each unit. Meanwhile my advertised speed is 35Mbit. I’m never going to notice if everybody saturates their connections and I lose 3% of my bandwidth. So.

There are higher packages, and so I dunno, maybe there is this class of people that is just super annoyed that they are suddenly surfing at “only” 34Mbit during peak hours. But as a huge computer nerd I am not in that set, and I suspect the number of people who are seriously annoyed by oversubscription in Austin is a rounding error.

> However, there are lots and lots of other costs your ignoring. For instance, installing copper is not cheap.

I think we are in agreement here. Essentially I am saying that the cost difference between routing 1 packet and routing 1,000,000 packets is negligible, because the cost to route 1 packet involves installing the copper/fiber (and upkeep apparently).

What you are saying is “Well, what if you need hundreds of megabits of speed at your apartment?” And yeah, that is a problem, because in that case we need to run new cable/fiber. But this is not really a “shared line” problem. There is no service here that advertises a 300mbit shared line. It doesn’t exist.

> But you have it backwards -- high-margin business connections subsidize cheap residential ones. Businesses pay for those two to three mile hops, and home users get cheaper access by virtue of being 'on-the-way' to a business.

This seems absurd to me, to the point of being unbelievable. It may be that business class fiber is installed first, because no ordinary resident will lease their own fiber. However “installed first” and “subsidizes the cost of other subscribers” are two totally orthogonal things.

If you consider a fully-connected residential network, it spans a larger area, and has a lot more cable installed (and probably is a lot more expensive to build), than a fully-connected business network. Thus, connecting an arbitrary business to a fully-connected residential network will always be cheaper than connecting an arbitrary residence to a fully-connected business network. This doesn’t have anything to do with “first” or “second”, it has to do with the size and linear feet of cable and square mileage of coverage of one type of network when measured against the other.

> Every home user signs an agreement, that clearly states what is "fair". I'm not inventing or assuming a definition of "fair", it's spelled out in detail when you subscribe for service.

This is literally the COMPLETE relevant part of my residential-class internet connection terms of service from a major ISP:

> The Services are for your reasonable, personal non-commercial use only. You may not provide the Services to any person who is not a member or guest in your household, or to persons outside your premises, whether for a fee or otherwise. You will take reasonable precautions to prevent others from gaining unauthorized access to the Services.

Can I run an HTTP server? I have no idea. Can I use 2TB a month? No clue. There is absolutely nothing "clear" about what I can or cannot do with my internet connection, and if you think being "clear" and "fair" is standard business practice for ISPs in the United States you need a real reality check.