[kvakvs]

Cost of the traffic is: hardware (staggered cost covered over many months), and running costs (subscription to higher tier internet carriers, electricity, rent of the premises, salaries etc). Most of this is covered by the monthly fees, to have a profitable business one must have those costs covered as a minimum. None of the above affects how much internet data goes through, zero or maxed out capacity, cost is the same.

[endisneigh]

This is patently false. Given optics can only support so many people at a given latency and bandwidth.