True, but neither do cell phone mintes to a cellular company. They just figured out a way to make the economics work while providing a better service to users.

Right. Unlike wireless minutes, though, ISPs would directly help their competition by offering rollover bandwidth:

http://acompa.net/blog/2011/05/why-isps-will-not-offer-rollo...

I disagree completely. It's just like real estate: since I only use about 50% of the floor space in my apartment at any given time, I roll over my unused square footage and only pay rent every other month.

The difference is when you don't use your bandwidth, the company benefits, but when you don't use your square footage, a company doesn't gain anything.

The ISP company only benefits if their pipe is saturated 100% at that moment. If they had spare capacity at that point in time, it's of no use to them and they can't carry it over.

Not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek, but: your house does not increase in size by 50% for every month you have that unused floor space.

Tangible vs. intangible, service vs. product, bandwidth is immediately available again as soon as you're done with it, etc.