how fast is 1.5Mbps

[BiPolar_Nut]

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BP,

Hopefully a lot of these restrictions are due to the service being relatively young. Maybe once the whole network is in place they'll remove some of these limitations.

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Actually, I believe it's so commercial connections still have value...like $250/mo 1.5 SDSL lines, $350/mo T1's, etc. They want to keep this for their idea of the ideal home user that just checks email, weather, and mild web browsing.

At the ISP level, there's no real cost difference between upstream and downstream bandwidth...but upstream bandwidth is more valuable to customers. That's (partially) why you can get a 6Mbit downstream asynchronous broadband connection for ~$100/mo at home, yet to get less than a third of that bandwidth synchronously (same speed up and down) would cost closer to $300 or much more depending on location.

In general, people that use/need more upstream bandwidth are far heavier users of bandwidth in general and drastically reduce how much an ISP can oversell their bandwidth. If ISP's couldn't oversell their bandwidth, the $20/mo unlimited dialup accounts never would have overcome the Compuserve "pay-per-minute" model around 1995 and we wouldn't have $20/mo ADSL options today.

Cliffs Notes: FIOS's TOS/AUP being very strict is critical to enabling them to offer such high speeds at such low (relative to the US market) prices. I don't expect those policies to *ever* change, although they could launch "business" service at double/triple the cost with looser policies.