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.
While it's stupid that ISPs are using their monopolies to screw consumers, the concept of data caps is not as stupid as you might think.
You're not just paying for the connection between you and the ISP, but also all the other data links that get your internet traffic to its destination. For example, those cables across the ocean are owned third parties and they charge money for every byte that goes through. It wouldn't be unreasonable for ISPs to pass that cost to users.
Furthermore, most links are overprovisioned in order to keep costs down. For example, if you assume that users only use 10% of their bandwidth on average, that means you can fit 10x as many people on a connection (or maybe 8x to account for peaks). This does mean that users should be discouraged from using their full bandwidth for long durations, otherwise the network operators can't overprovision as much and have to invest more in infrastructure.