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.

  • Monkey With A ShellEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    Same boat here, I have what seems to be a legacy plan now for a 1G/50M with 6 or maybe 8 TB (it changed during the plauge years and I don’t recall if they dropped it back down) for about $150/month. The only other options around are wireless or a 80/10 dsl through century link that interestingly enough has no cap. Supposedly century link is working on fiber sometime that will give a dymetric uncapped option for about $70 though.

    Meanwhile, in the town of Moticello less than 50 miles away they have two high end fiber nets because the city decided to build their own and the local ISP decided it better do so to in order to not be extinct, after of course trying to sue the city saying they can’t do that.

    • @dfc09English
      2•1 year ago

      Holy crap everything you were saying was hitting word chords in me, so relatable, then you said Monticello. I just moved to Earl Park, was going to have to decide between Century Link and satellite, then Mainstream came through like a week before I closed on the house and installed cheap fast fiber.

      • Monkey With A ShellEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        If I where to move that would certainly be a factor in the future. I’ve been here since 2006 when the fastest offering was a lot less than it is now. Mostly I’d just like to get the speeds more balanced, I don’t really need 1G down but with all the self hosting I’ve taken to in the last few years it would be nice to boost the upload and their next tier down at 500/50 cuts the cap in at least half because '“f’ck you, we can”.

    • @TheRagingGeekEnglish
      0•1 year ago

      The CenturyLink fiber plan is pretty nice, me and my brother in law are on it and it runs as advertised and I’ve had maybe 2 outages in the 3 years I’ve had it, unlike my previous provider where it would be like 1 per quarter