Originally Posted by Babaganoosh

You're arguing with the wrong person.

I worked for that small local cable company. We were one of the first in the nation to set up internet service through cable. We were second only to Boulder CO. I had a cable modem in my house before most people had ever heard of a cable modem.

You most likely don't have fiber running to your house. You have a little coax drop that connects to a tap which allows subscribers to connect to the little half-inch, aluminum shielded coax cable called a feeder. That signal has to travel to and from your cable modem down the drop and feeder until it reaches a fiber node. Then it travels back to the cable system's head end where it hits a massive fiber pipe that most of us only fantasize about and begins its trek on the internet.

It is 100% possible to burn more bandwidth than is available on that coax feeder and even on the fiber going to the cable system. Newer cable systems shouldn't have that problem for a while but aging cable systems have quality of service issues every night about the time people get home from work and jump online to play games, surf porn or do whatever it is they do online. Lots of people complain about slow service during peak hours. The problem isn't with the internet backbone. That's just fine for the time being.