Hi Zane

>I wonder how much bandwidth, out of the hundreds of channels arriving on the tv cable, is actually required for one channel.
>

Certainly not enough that I can't have a highspeed cable modem on the line at the same time, but are you not suggesting that potentially hundreds of devices would be in need of a percentage of the bandwidth?

>WRT VOIP: I don't know how they can bill for it. I've been working on www.webtrain.com's networking for many months. I'm tunneling video, audio, and several other data-streams simultaneously over an HTTPS connection and I don't see how, as a practical matter, ISPs can prevent that sort of (ab)use of the protocol. :-)

Certainly one way they could bill is per megabyte of transfer. Number of packets received etc. These can definitely be tracked.