Hopefully it doesn’t go like the way Eircom has been doing here in Ireland. Here, they seem to have their lower end connections (1Mb / 3Mb / 7.6Mb) on one line and their higher end connections (12Mb / 24Mb) on another line. I noticed this at work, where we had a 7.6Mb connection and found that in the afternoon, the actual throughput was at best ~2Mb and typically ~500kbps on speed tests . When I would complain, they would blame our equipment, router, PC, fax machine, too many users downloading at our premises, etc. The same was with one of my colleagues connected to this same exchange. We had our work connection upgraded to 12Mb as we needed a faster uplink and to our surprise, we get a constant ~10Mb in speed tests since the upgrade, yet my colleague who still has the slower DSL connection at home still gets crippled performance in the afternoon and evenings.
[QUOTE=debro;2558557]Eventually, this premium becomes the defacto standard … and then there will be a premium premium … which becomes the defacto standard … and then so-on and so forth, until eventually any internet presence will be prohibitively expensive for everyone 
[/QUOTE]
I remember this is exactly how it went when I had Satellite Internet access before DSL came to my area. With the standard access, I had something like a 500MB (yes MB) monthly allowance with one provider and if I was online at peak time, it was often quicker to use my 56k modem than the satellite connection. They had various premium levels which they called gears and well outside of what I could afford. E.g. Gear 2 had traffic priority over users on Gear 1, Gear 3 had even higher priority and the same up to Gear 5, which had an insane running cost, but I’m sure would have been fast for anyone with a deep pocket. 
