This is not entirely true, at least not globally. At least in Germany the broadband connections like VDSL 25 or VDSL 50 provided by T-Com have guaranteed minimal speeds of 50% the advertised download speed (i.e. 25 or 50 MBit/s with 12,5 or 25 MBit/s being the minimum). If this cannot be reliably provided you will be automatically downgraded and charged less which is kind of fair. Besides, I have to say that my VDSL 50 was virtually always fully available - I often syncronized data with my own webserver and downloaded large data packages from our institute servers and I virtually always maxed out at the advertised 5 MB/s. I think when people are complaining about slow download speeds its much more often the upload of the server they're downloading from... just think about it: Only 20 users sucking with 50 MBit/s already max out a 1 GBit/s upload connection from a webserver, which - aside from the network connection - also requires the server to continuously provide a 125 MB/s stream of data. So, in the defense of ISPs, I would much rather say that the target server cannot hold up with the ever-growing download speeds of end users. BTW: I recently moved to Boston, MA. Apparently my soon-to-be-taken apartment has its internet wiring from Comcast. Any thoughts on that? Good? Bad?

Is it only me, or is the page mentioned in the posting down the entire time? Slashdotted right from the beginning...