Didn't seem like such an issue during COVID when everyone was home 24/7 using their internet. Comcast likes to make this same claim but somehow their network didnt collapse during that time. I understand that cell towers have an upper limit on connections but I dont believe for a second that most are currently operating near their limit. Furthermore, nobody is forcing TMobile, Verizon, or anyone else to advertise their plans as "unlimited" if, as they claim, they aren't able to handle the traffic.

And also that would make residential connections expensive as hell and waste resources on every step on the network. I'm on a relatively small ISP but still have symmetric 1Gbps connection. If every customer even on this small ISP had their full bandwidth available to everything all the time they'd need at least several Tbps combined capacity which would take considerable chunk of all the capacity we have on the whole country to abroad just to serve few thousand houses.

Well yeah, but there are different kinds of oversubscription. There's the one that makes still sense, because you only run into bandwidth issues on special occasions or short periods during the times with the heaviest loads, and there's the other that is powered by greed and leads to a permanent lack of bandwidth.

That's why I said the average daily maximum of traffic should be the determining factor here

That gives wiggle room for the GtA6 launch, but it means everyone gets the advertised speed. And if they're not, the company can refund the difference to affected customers each month

I realize they're oversubscribed, but that's exactly the problem. They are not investing properly in infrastructure

But companies hate nothing more than leaving money on the table. It makes their numbers look absolutely offensive to business/finance types... So my suggestion would realign the incentives in a way that would make them proactively expand/upgrade the network as needed

But it also doesn't mean they have to build out a ton of unnessesary bandwidth - they would just have to meet actual peak demand

With basic traffic analysis and statistics, they could easily stay ahead of this

You're correct, like I said that's the default. A home router might not have it, but basically every commercial piece of network gear has had it for decades now. It was basically required for things like VOIP back in the day, so it became very standard