>All nodes have the same capabilities on the Internet, as far as sending and receiving packets to other nodes is concerned.
This is clearly untrue. Just look at DOCSIS (Cable Internet). If everyone on your block is streaming netflix at the same time you all suffer, which is why some people complain about speed during peak hours.
This is simply the case that the architecture being laid out to consumer is designed for specific use cases.
None of that has anything to do with the capabilities of Internet connected computers. Regardless of your connection speed or latency, you can communicate with any other computer that is connected to the Internet. That was the vision and thankfully it remains the reality of the Internet (despite the increasing threat).
It has everything to do with the capabilities of Internet connected computers. Your previous post asked why you couldn't saturate your connection. While we would all like to believe every node on the internet is equal, there are physical engineering limits and cost constraints we have to adhere to.
Simply put, the economics simply don't make sense to give everyone in the neighborhood the ability for 24/7 1Gbps. It doesn't make sense because your grandma, won't max the connection 24/7, however she would still like for her Netflix movies to download quickly. So its been decided upon that ISP-x will only put $10 million rather than $20 million so that everyone can enjoy 1Gbps internet, just not 24/7 and all at the same time. If you do need this type of connection, then get a business class connection where you do have these guarantees, and the extra money you pay goes into making sure the infrastructure can meet your demands.
However, at the end of the day it doesn't make sense to charge everyone more, for the needs of what must be 1% of the population. Remember for the most part this isn't used to stop you from SSHing into your home computer. This is stop people from using the connection in a perverse way from how it was designed. Its a simple engineering tradeoff.
If everyone on your block (and the rest of your ISP) is streaming Netflix at the same time it's more likely to be slow either because your ISP has effectively capped Netflix traffic upstream by not adding more peering connections [0] and/or is not taking advantage of Netflix' freely provided cache[1] system.
This is clearly untrue. Just look at DOCSIS (Cable Internet). If everyone on your block is streaming netflix at the same time you all suffer, which is why some people complain about speed during peak hours.
This is simply the case that the architecture being laid out to consumer is designed for specific use cases.