This is about the ISPs being greedy and not installing enough capacity - in the form of routers - for the load. They designed their systems like a party line betting that only so many of their users would be using services at a time. Bandwidth is almost certainly not a limiting factor.
And with USA internet services being more expensive than most anywhere else in the world they look even greedier.
Um, this is specifically *Europeans* crashing the *European* segments of the internet. The US segment of internet isn’t actually having too many problems with this.
Also, in many European countries, one or more of the big ISPs in their nation are run by the government. TMobile? It’s the German post office.
Straight subscription - i.e. no over-subscription is EXPENSIVE. Most users will not pay for dedicated bandwidth due to the cost. Thus ISPs have adopted an over-subscription model. This allows them to keep the per user cost down.
Allow me to illustrate
Assume a 10 Mbit line costs 1,000 dollars to install. If I allow 10 users to share that line under straight subscription, each person only gets 1 Mbit and has to pay $100. If I oversubscribe by a 10:1 factor, I can allow each connection 100K with a burst of up to 1 Mbit (perhaps even higher) .... if the bandwidth is available. Here is where free markets kick in. I can also drop my price point. Some ISPs will drop the price point by the same over-subscription factor so the $100 drops down to $10 but is time 100 users.
Granted this is a gross oversimplification.
Also, internet traffic is very bursty and is not a steady stream for most applications. For example, lets use your web browser. You put in the URL, the browser goes out and grabs the content and WAITS while you decide what to do. Steaming videos use a different model.
The congestion is coming from a change in the way consumers are using the Internet. As more consumers use streaming services, the ability to burst becomes less relevant and less usable.
This is exactly why I got off of the shared cable solution and paid for a bonded ADSl solution for my last mile. At least my first point of congestion is now at the central office and not in my neighborhood.
Similar to Governors and healthcare capacity.