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.

  • @orangeboatsEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    I sorta understand why data caps were implemented in the past. Some people hosted servers on their home connection, and their total internet traffic in a week would far exceed that of a normal user’s. Data caps were meant to force people to be conservative on their internet usage so this would not happen.

    But come on now, it’s 2023. If your internet infrastructure could not handle that amount of traffic, you are a laughing stock of ISPs.

    • @OvercastEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      Data cap never made sense because ISPs pay for pipe size, not total of data. Someone using 20mbps 24/7 will use a lot more data but cause a lot less congestion than someone using 300mbps for 1hr at peak hour every day.

      If their infra is undersized, they should at least not count data between midnight and 8am toward the data cap since the pipes are mostly sitting idles

      • @orangeboatsEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        Overall everyone will use less data when there’s a data cap, I found.

        My ISP implemented data caps back then too (thankfully it’s all removed now, but 60GB was really bonkers!) and I just find it fascinating how much traffic I generate nowadays, when I don’t have to care how much data I have left this month.

        Anyways, data caps shouldn’t be relevant anymore in 2023 when absolutely everything can handle gigabits and more. It’s interesting how American ISPs still implement them.