Some put it the other way around: you owe the ever-improving network to the heavyweight users [1]. Well, at least Cisco says that -- and you know what they sell.

In any case, it's not the other user that oversold the bandwidth; it's the ISP. They made an unhedged bet, it fell short of working out(predictably), so it's their turn to foot the costs of upgrading the network.

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[1] http://business.financialpost.com/2011/03/04/bootup-heavy-we...

Recently I was traveling a lot, and therefore making regular use of TMobile tethering (I also have an N1). At one hotel in particular where I had a long term stay the wifi was very slow and intermittent, and so I eventually hit the point - 5GB I think - where TMobile starts throttling bandwidth (supposedly to EDGE speeds, but it felt slower than that).

I recognize that's an unusual amount of usage for one month and I would have gladly paid extra money to TMobile to continue getting full speed data, but they don't even offer the option to do so - I assume because that would require them to admit that the service advertised as 'unlimited 3G' isn't really.