Everyone is trapped inside trying to stream HD video and all physical medium has limits. Especially coax. Why does supply and demand surprise anyone? This isn’t a conspiracy.
I used to read about how ISPs were overselling and would be in trouble if everyone was using their connection to the fullest. It was always talked of as a hypothetical because it used to be pretty unlikely that every person would be home and needing to use the internet so much at the same time. Now that so many people are home and needing to use the internet, it’s not hypothetical and we get to see how ISPs are actually able to handle the load: and as many predicted it would not be able to keep up. I think this isn’t news in the sense that everyone thought it would be fine; I think this is news because this was a known but not addressed situation. It will be interesting if this leads to capacity upgrades or if we’ll see more pleas for major content producers and consumers to constrain their resources to keep the infrastructure running. I think people would like to see upgrades so that we can get the previous speeds and quality but we’ll see.
The hypothetical already exists, it's called the evening peak hours. I'm not familiar with every part of the US however in Europe most ISPs saw no need to throttle video as the current situation merely makes the usual peak last longer.
Or more, as now "watching on-line videos" doesn't compete with alternatives like "going out" or "being too tired after work to do anything but eat and sleep".
Why would it be 2x the normal evening peak hours? Yes, normally maybe second shift workers and the rolling shifts of people going out to eat would reduce normal peak usage slightly, but I can’t imagine it being 2x.
Because ordinarily, not everyone watches videos in the evening; people go visit each other, go out to bars, go on dates, etc. Now however, meeting and outside activities are unavailable.
It is common for ISPs to have 2000+ customers sharing a 1 gig line. Regardless of the speeds offered end users use about the same amount of bandwidth. End users all get "full speed" until the link is 95%+ used.
This is about the contention ratio, and service delivery. When you have many users you can still deliver great service even if the contention ratio seems higher. There are two main factors for planning the bandwidth needed, the average data use/bandwidth use, and what max utilization is during the peak, typically 6-8pm when the highest number of users are using the network. If you are selling 100mb plans, as long as you have at least 100mb of available bandwidth during the peak times, any individual user can still burst up to the plan max. So that is 90% on a 1 gig line, or 95% on a 2 gig line. 1 gigabit a second for a month is about 325k gigabytes total. Or about 160gb per month per customer data use for 2000 customers sharing a 1 gig line with near 100% use. There are also multiple steps where the contention ratio or bandwidth use matters ranging from very local, last mile issues to international ones related to peering.
In the US, most providers are operating under a near total government-granted any government-protected monopoly. They like to pretend there’s competition in the market but that’s mostly smoke and mirrors, designed explicitly to preserve their special status as the only game in town.
The fact that they are oversubscribed to the point where it doesn’t work well in an emergency would not be such a big deal - except that they are granted a moat.
They can and should be held to a higher standard as a result. The term “critical infrastructure” comes to mind.
