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.

  • WtfEvenIsExistence3️@reddthat.comEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Okay I might sound like an idiot, but what’s the difference between a phone plan’s minutes/messages quota and internet usage quota? Aren’t they both selling a predetermined amount of usage for a predetermined amount of money?

    • vithigar@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      There isn’t much difference at all. Neither should have a cap.

      Data moving across a network doesn’t have any per-unit cost to the people operating the network. Whether you use 5TB or 5GB doesn’t impact the bottom line of the ISPs at all.

      The only justification for a data cap would be if they’ve overprovisioned their network and sold too many people plans that are too fast for their network to support, so they need to disincentivise people from actually using it. Even then that’s pretty shaky justification.