Naughty, naughty, Mike! You appear to be suggesting that Economics is unscientific! Next thing you know, you will be suggesting that Financial Advisers might give advice that maximises their commissions, rather than being best for the client.
Cost of communications infrastructure is all upfront, and the aim is to amortise that as quickly as possible and milk the profits after the initial debts are paid off. So network owners try to fill the bandwidth as tightly as possible. Once the fibre or cable is in place, using it costs nothing extra.
The solution is a mix of wholesale and retail selling. Tescos get a good wholesale rate, but they gamble that they can resell it profitably, and Tesco pay for marketing, billing and support. Big single clients can bulk-buy a T3 line and get gigabytes cheap, relative to capacity.
You will quite often find the same thing in retailing, for example those ads for weird personal products in Sunday newspapers. The price differs for the same product, even on the same day for the same company. Somebody in a back room is graphing the publication, the item price, and the number of sales, to come up with an optimum pricing point with volume against unit price and manufacturing cost, to maximise overall profit.
If they are constructing a theory, conducting an experiment, plotting the data, and interpreting the results, they are probably doing science. Doesn't make me like them any the more, though.
