it is the same reason why the price of gum went from 25 cents to 30 cents

if when the price of gum went to 30 cents, everyone stopped buying it, they would have reduced it back to 25 cents because they rather make the 25 cents that they used to make, than 0 cents for their product.

the same goes for comcast, they reduce the quality of their service, they impost stupid limitations (these limitations are there for the sole reason for allowing them to oversell their service with out spending money on upgrading their capacity

comcast may give 10Mbits of bandwidth, but they don’t have enough bandwidth for all of their customers to use 10Mbits at the same time, this is because even though they have gotten more customers over the years, they spent no money into improving the service to handle the load of the extra customers, all they did was add more limitations to prevent their customers from being able to use the speed that they PAID for

they cant expect people to buy a high speed connection and just use it for e-mail
we go for highspeed because we do things that require the added speed

and if they complain that people who use their full speed are causing slowdowns then that meant they there selling bandwidth that they don’t have

it is like having a box of pizza that has 6 equal slices, if you were sharing it with 6 friends, each of you took a slice, would you go crazy and yell at your friend for eating his slice too fast, of taking to big of a bite from his slice?

and if pirating is their argument then
html and ftp can also be used to pirate, so do you think comcast will start blocking or making FTP and HTML traffic extremely slow also?

Comcast have made a minor admission to “delaying” P2P traffic http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/comcast-were-delaying-not-blocking-bittorrent-traffic/

I’m no defender of the “anti-competitive, anti-consumer regulations” you mention, but that’s unlikely to have anything to do with being unable to get FiOS in your area…. the rollout of FTTP on the scale Verizon has undertaken isn’t something you do on an ad hoc basis. When they get to your neighbourhood it will be available. Where it gets rolled out to and when is simple economics.

If you’re interested in anti-competitive behaviour in relation to FiOS you might want to look into reports of Verizon snipping the old copper telephone wires when customers sign up to the FiOS voice service. The customer (and future occupants of the property) not only lose the choice of going back to POTS, but also the choice of other local providers using the old copper network. Verizon denies this of course.