> Your network no matter the bandwidth to your house is oversubscribed. If everyone was using their network connection at max capacity 24/7 there would be network congestion issues.

No, not necessarily. That's how Verizon Residential chose to build out their network but that's not the only way to do so. The commercial side of Verizon manages to provide their customers with 100% of SLA throughput 24/7 no problems. Technically this is feasible.

I would agree that I might not be able to get 100% utilization at the price I am currently paying. That is a point I will concede. BUT, SOMEHOW Google Fiber in three cities and Chattanooga is also supplying gigabit fiber. And they're not charging $10k/mo per person to do so. Could everyone use the full gigabit connection 24/7? I seriously doubt it. But if they're oversubscribed by 10x on gigabit and other places are oversubscribed by 10x on 100 Mbps then they are successfully delivering 10x the internet for the same price, or perhaps 50%-100% more. It's not linear that's for sure.

For your argument to hold water if Google Fiber was 10x faster than Verizon, then Google Fiber would also have to be 10x as oversubscribed as Verizon. I very, very seriously doubt that this is the case.

> Thus the arguments that "I've been sold 50Mbps/down I should be able to use it at max capacity 24/7" without issue are incorrect.

This is a straw man argument. You are not engaging in an honest dialog. You seem to be purposefully obtuse. People watching Netflix in NO WAY constitutes 100%, 24/7 utilization!

How about "I've been sold 50 Mbps service and I want to use 3 Mbps of it for an average of 3 hours per day, which is a measly 6% of the advertised speed and is only 12.5% of the 24/7"

There are two ways to do the math here. One is based on peak utilization, where we assume that everyone watches Netflix at the same time, 100% identically, say from 6pm-9pm. In that case Verizon can be over-subscribed by a factor of roughly 16x (50Mbps/3Mbps) and still keep their customers happy.

The other is to assume that everyone watches Netflix perfectly randomly. In that case let's assume 3 hours per day. Here Verizon can be over-subscribed first by the 16x (since people don't use all 50 Mbps) and further by another 8x (since people are using the service for 3/24 hours per day). That gives you an over-subscribed factor of 128x.

The truth of course would lie somewhere in between 16x and 128x. But what we're seeing is that Verizon is over-subscribed by a factor of more than 16x otherwise people wouldn't have any problems watching Netflix. Put as percentages instead of ratios, customers are asking Verizon to provide between 0.75% and 6% of what they promised to deliver, and Verizon is refusing to do even that.

Further we have evidence via a blog post from Verizon that their entire network is NOT oversubscribed by a factor of 16x as it's only at 40-60% utilization. What is happening is that Verizon is throttling their users at the peering point. It's a great gig if you don't get caught. http://publicpolicy.verizon.com/blog/entry/why-is-netflix-bu...

If we assume that 100% of all traffic on Verizon's network is from Netflix that means Verizon could double the peering bandwidth to L3 before their network got congested. Is that a valid assumption? I don't know, but I sincerely doubt it's 100%. During peak hours it might make up 50%. In that case doubling the peering bandwidth would increase utilization from roughly 50% to roughly 75% which is perfectly acceptable.

It must take some pretty fantastic mental gymnastics to convince yourself that a provider who is not able to make good on 6% end-user utilization is totally in the right and their upset customers are irrational and wrong.