I thought data caps for home internet were a thing of the past…
I’ve somewhat recently moved back to a very rural area of the Midwest. Small town. No stop lights. Biggest businesses other than the bars are Casey’s, Subway, and Dollar General.
And we have one ISP (not counting DSL) — Mediacom. When we first signed up, I had to go with the second service tier. But not because of speeds, but so I could have a reasonable 1 TB/mo data cap.
Lucky me, they increased the cap to 1.5 TB. 🙄
I hope that in my lifetime I can see ISPs regulated as a public utility.
In Germany we pay lots of money for 5G data volume. For me I got 20 Gigs for about 40 bucks, this is mostly Not a thing in the rest of Europe. But data plans on landlines are really dumb.
In France at least I doubt it.
The only time I remember caps on landlines was when 56k modem were still the norm. Once ADSL was rolled out there was pretty much no caps anymore.
I think the fact that we had some healthy competition for landlines from the get go in my country meant the ISPs couldn't get that much greedy and put caps in place. So it never ended being common where I live.
And when it was old school modems, well you were already paying for the phone communications anyway when connected to the internet so it wasn't really unlimited anyway.
Well, I’m in portugal, which does NOT have a lot of healthy competition in the communication space, and as far as I remember there haven’t been data caps (I’m 18, so last 10 years is what I reasonably remember regarding being online), so I’ve always assumed it had to be some European level law