Thats pretty much how it was before stm. The modem config set your quality of service to whatever speed you paid for and there was no other cap/monitoring. Unfortunately this didn't work so well once the user base got to a certain point, mostly because too many people were abusing a domestic connection and continuously maxing out that connection. The result was that other people on the same node had to suffer a degraded service. This was especially bad at certain times of the day, mostly in the late afternoon/early evening. STM is simply vm's response to this problem.
People need to realise that VM is a contended service although the contention mechanism isn't the same as ADSL. Every user is in direct competition for bandwidth with every other user that is currently using the same node. Each node may have 50-100 users competing for the bandwidth allocation for that node which may be as little as 50Mbps.
