"Complete congestion is a technical fantasy which only exists in the minds of people who do not understand TCP congestion control and how Additive Increase/Multiplicative Decrease (AIMD) works in TCP Congestion avoidance works, he says. "AIMD allows a linear growth of bandwidth utilization until loss occurs, at which time an exponential reduction takes place. This slow-start, fast-fallback ensures congestion cannot cause gridlock."

"In an ISP, such as Insight's network, a network upgrade ought to be performed if the network is routinely experiencing congestion," he notes. "This does not mean that individual cable modems ought to be provisioned with higher speeds, but that the shared pool of uplink bandwidth that they share ought to be increased to reduce the occurrence of congestion."

As Mr. Willner pointed out, network upgrades that are intended to enhance the speed and quality of Internet access would, in the absence of network management, only exacerbate this problem because P2P users around the world seek to retrieve files from computers on systems with the fastest upload speeds.

said by TKJunkMail :

My suggestion:
- Boot the "I need unlimited bandwidth 24x7" wackos or force them to pay much, much more for their service.
- stop offering increased speed tiers and start offering byte transfer tiers with costs based accordingly.

said by qworster :

Look, the ISPs were handed a virtual monopoly by the FCC and used it to SCREW the consumer! THEY are the ones that acted irresponsibly. Should they not be sanctioned for this?