If you are downloading a distro, and at the same time you place a VoIP phone call, what do you do if the audio is all broken up? Do you pause the torrent client to get better phone service? I do*. Now, put the torrent client in your neighbor's house, where you don't have have the ability to pause your neighbor's download when you want to use the phone. Is it fair?

To me this is a problem with bad network management. Lets say you have a 10 Mbit/s pipe from a neighbourhood to the internet. And you sell 5 Mbit/s connections in that neighbourhood. All is fine when 2 people are saturating their connection. All of a sudden a third person starts up a bittorrent client that makes many, many TCP connections. According to Bell, that third person is actually going to be able to hog bandwidth, since Bell will split the pipe up such that each _TCP connection_ gets it's share. So the two "normal" people will suffer an unfair degradation of service. I'd be happier with a situation where in times of saturation, subscribers as a whole were throttled to fairness. If three people are saturating the pipe, they should each get 1/3 of the pipe, max.