Shared dedicated or dedicated shared?

I like having internet at home. Sure, it's not quite the same as multiple 30M+ pipes at work, but it's plenty fast enough to waste time on youtube and settle arguments with wikipedia. These days, most people have pretty much two options for home connections with decent speed: DSL over phone lines, or cable modem over CATV lines. (At this point, I'm not really counting FIOS yet.)

Now the primary thing that you want from an ISP is a reliable, fast internet connection. All of the other fluffy, feel good benefits like more free email addresses, little bits of web storage, etc don't really count for much if your web pages take minutes to load. One of the little canards that DSL providers love to throw that really, really bugs me is the "DSL is dedicated! Cable is shared!"

I'm a network guy. I build and maintain 'em for a living. Now, it's true that with cable modems, the bandwidth is shared per coaxial segment among all of the customers on that segment, while each DSL customer gets to use all available bandwidth on that particular dedicated pair of lines. But guess what all those dedicated lines do? That's right, they go into a set of equipment (routers and uplinks) that are - horrors! - shared.

There isn't a network on this planet that doesn't do some level of oversubscription. Cable modem providers simply have to allocate enough bandwidth to each neighborhood loop to satisfy the actual demands, just like DSL providers have to do with their aggregation points.

Now, when an ISP starts advertising with promises of no hidden bittorent filters, secret P2P filters, or anti-criticism termination clauses - in short, the things that the Net Neutrality people have been lobbying for - then I'll care.