Common depends on the scale you’re imagining. Comcast has well over 140,000 nodes. Just 5% is not very common but would be 7,000 nodes. If that many have to be split in the course of a year, that’s almost 27 nodes every weekday. More than 1 per working hour. Enough that the company has a process on how to handle it and many are well versed in it. Is that now a common scenario or not?
Man-of-Leisure Most homes would have trouble saturating 300Mb upload for long periods of time.
Most homes, yes, but it doesn’t take many to cause issues, and Comcast has 29,300,000+ internet customers.
250 customers on a node each uploading 2 Mbps will saturate that mid-split node upload capacity. 125 at 4 mbps, 63 at 8 mbps, 32 at 16 mbps, etc. Scale is everything. What is your upload speed for the videos you send to work or your Google Drive? How many mbps are you and your kids using Facetiming with others for hours like you claimed earlier? Do they Twitch stream? Do you have a security system uploading video from multiple cameras to the cloud? Do you keep uploading to a minimum on your SB6190?
Again, YOU having a difficult time imagining nodes being congested means nothing, it happens. YOU not knowing if a node is becoming congested means nothing, the vast majority are handled before customers notice. You also don’t know what was done to keep the node seeming uncongested because the provider is doing its job.