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.
Data caps on home internet services should be illegal. They should also be much higher on mobile, but that's a whole other topic.
I have 940/940 Unlimited FTTH for $93.45(Canadian).
And France gets 5Gbps for €30 per month or 8Gbps for €40 per month. I’m in the US now and really miss free.fr as my ISP
What average consumer has hardware that's actually capable of using more than 1Gbps?
Most decent to higher end desktops have at least 2.5 Gbps. Even a laptop/desktop that doesn't can get a 2.5 Gbps usb-c to ethernet dongle for like $30-$40.
Higher end access points also have 2.5 Gbps. I have no issue maxing out my 1.5 Gbps (ISP over provisions the lines so I get 1.7 gbps) on Steam. Also keep in mind that when you have a faster connection with multiple devices/people, each device/person might be able to pull 1 Gbps. As in if you have 2 Gbps internet service even 2 older computers that only have a gigabit internet connection, each could get the full gigabit to them.
If you're the type of person that only uses wifi, you won't see a difference between gigabit and multigigabit connections but plenty of people have ethernet throughout their homes and they make use of faster than gigabit connections.