Re: If a packet gets delayed or dropped because of congestion...
ISP's do have standards for how much traffic they carry, and it is generally higher than 50%.
Most of these standards do not apply to residential services where over-subscription (i.e. DSL or cable) is a commonly used method of keeping costs down for end users.
i.e. the ballpark for Internet connectivity outside of London is around £1000/Mbps per annum for uncontended symmetric access or around £12/Mbps per annum for a business Internet connection (asymetric traffic rates). The ballpark for New York is US$12,000/annum for 1Gbps (up/down) over fibre via a lower tier ISP versus around US$12/Mbps for cable (asymetric traffic rates),
Some of the difference is in the service level (i.e. DSL is generally a technician on-site within 3 days and service credit after 14 days of outage versus 4 hour response and typical service restoration within 24 hours although that changes to 3 days in some cases) and contact, but some of the cost is also providing a high-quality circuit between the ISP's point-of-presence and the customer, in addition to peering/Internation bandwidth etc.
For the US sites I have knowledge of, the issue is generally a lack of options outside of large cities - some of our remote users in the US have a choice of multiple packages from a single provider with nothing above 8Mbps DSL and it hasn't changed in the last 10+ years. For businesses we will pay to dig in if the incumbant telco's offerings are awful...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
