Its a cornerstone of building cost efficient networks. People pay for a certain sized pipe, what they pay also covers the rest of the ISPs networks and costs. With no oversubscription the ISP would need maybe 20-30x more infrastructure, do you think it would have an impact on what you pay?
Not sure why I have to say this, but, networks are not airplanes.
Not oversubscribing is a cost multiplier at every level. 1 million 1 Gbit customers in a city is going to need 1000 100Gbit connections out of that city and the same for transit, and that will have no impact on pricing? And everything is on average used at 1% of capacity.
If my ISP can only afford to supply me with 1TB of transfer at 1Gbit, that's fine. They can put it in the adverts, the contracts, and the pricing. For customers who want 10TB of transfer, they can offer a higher cost option.
And if they choose to gamble, advertising and entering into contracts promising "unlimited data", which they think will be more profitable across their entire customer base? Then they've got to do supply what they promised in the adverts. They chose to gamble that way, and if they lose money gambling that's their business.
You have that on mobile subscriptions usually, heavy users pay more and low usage users are not subsidizing them.
I take you are fine with paying 10x or even more for your no oversubscription Internet connection then?
Oversubscription is not gambling. The way it works after your last mile connection is that ISPs look at link usage in their network, city level distribution, city to city, transit, peering, etc, once it reaches 60-80% utilization at peak you start looking at adding more capacity. Bad ISPs (most US ISPs) will let this go too far though.
That's not the same thing. A more adequate comparison would be to say that you promised 30 people they can have a burger, but can only produce 5 burgers per minute. If everyone show up at exactly the same time, you won't be able to satisfy them all (they'll have to wait). But overall you can consider that the probability of such thing happening is small enough to take the "gamble".
It might be if traffic had sudden jumps of like 30%, but it doesn't and there is headroom available. Traffic increases slowly over time and you have plenty of time to upgrade your network.
> 10gbps transit at the rock bottom rate costs $600/mo.
So then 300Mb/s transit, which is around the services these incumbent dinosaur ISPs are offering, is $20/mo? And $20/mo is only 10-20% of their large monthly bills? You're basically proving the opposing argument here in the general case [0].
For reference, I've asked my 1Gb/s municipal provider if they have bandwidth caps, and they told me "no" and that they are not concerned with how much bandwidth I use.
[0] The specific case is that most users are streaming video from large entertainment providers, for which the ISP isn't even paying transit but rather merely the electricity and rack units of CDN edge boxes.
The point of oversubscription is maintaining a network that keeps costs low while providing a good service without congestion. They monitor their network (not your last mile connection, everything else) and once links start reaching 60-80% of capacity at peak times you start adding more capacity. Bad ISPs (like most US ISPs) let this go way too far though.
It appears that your ignorance on the topics of infrastructure and the advancement of technology over the past five decades makes having a useful conversation impossible. Not every cable in the ground was installed with today's state of the art technology. Enjoy your apparently unthrottleable internet connection.
Not sure why I have to say this, but, networks are not airplanes.