[Chrysalis]

ignition I mean the demand on the infrastructure from 10mbit tier customers as a whole, if the port these customers are on is overwhelmed then its evident that the demand is more than VM are able/willing to spend on. So in the case of this argument its ultimately irrelevant how many customers are on the port. I would say its a case of VM in my area of underestimating the costs of supplying a 10mbit service.

I expect the average usage per customer on 50mbit tier is nowhere near 5 times the average usage of a 10mbit customer.

Another thing that is hardly ever taken into account on these discussions in profit margin.

Lets take an example.

ISP has baseline costs of £10 month whatever the speed, then a nomimal increase in costs depending on service supplied.

So lets say.

10mbit sold for £12 month with £10 base cost= £2 profit month per customer.
20mbit sold for £17 a month with £10 base cost and extra £1 cost, so £6 on average profit per customer.
30mbit sold for £25 month with £10 base cost and extra £2 cost, £13 profit per customer.

I see this argument with adsl providers also, people who claim automatically that low users on bottom packages are more profiteable than premium services, but forgetting the margins are very low on base packages. The saving grace for the lower tier's is the customer volume, I have no doubt per customer VM make less profit than on the top tiers.