Provisioning is what ISPs call the amount of Internet backbone capacity they buy per subscriber. This number is always less than the amount of bandwidth we think we are buying because most of the time Internet connections aren’t used at all and ISPs count on this to keep costs under control. If you are buying an 8 megabit-per-second connection from your ISP, he in turn provisions you with around 50 kilobits-per-second of backbone. This data arbitrage is part of what makes being a broadband ISP so profitable.
Source: I, Cringely Bandwidth caps are rate hikes – I, Cringely
and his follow-up article:
The fact is there’s class warfare taking place between big and small business not just on the Internet but everywhere.
In the conflict between big and small I tend to come down on the side of small. We’re recovering from the worst recession in a generation and big companies aren’t doing a damn thing to help. They don’t pay taxes, they don’t create jobs, they don’t spend money, and as a result the economy is under-stimulated. Large U.S. corporations have restructured themselves to avoid taxation, they see their primary function as increasing productivity which means decreasing employment, they have their highest profits ever and are sitting on $2 trillion in cash that they aren’t going to spend.
Source: I, Cringely Internet Class Warfare – I, Cringely
I’d encourage any readers to check out out the longer, better thought-out comments questioning the demographic, geographic, and infrastructure differences that may or may not account for stuff in here. The second article also shows more clearly the bias of the author.