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.
From an Aussie where our Internet is somewhat considered a "public utility" (NBNCo), it's not the best. I'm paying $130/mo (Aussie bucks) for 250/100 fibre.
Our NTDs are capable of gigabit symmetrical, but thanks to our Lord and Saviour, Rupert Murdoch, it was essentially limited speed wise and the network was built with ridiculous complexity, such as the CVC constraints (Connectivity Virtual Circuit), which means ISPs have to buy additional bandwidth and hope and pray that every user doesn't max out their connections at the same time.
For example, the POI (Point of Interconnect) I'm connected to has a total of 1.5Gbps with the ISP I'm with. Based on their stats which they make public to customers, I'm guesstimating that there's approximately ~50 other households in my POI area connected with this ISP. We all have to share that bandwidth otherwise it slows to a crawl.
ETA: I'm purely talking about the FTTP network here, not the other part of the mess that is NBNCo and FTTN/C/B, Fixed Wireless, Satellite & HFC... the NBN is a complete mess.