Selfhosted

I am very thankful that I do not live in the United States. Even in Canada where telecommunications services are notoriously expensive, data caps on cellphone plans are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Carriers like Freedom Mobile will simply throttle your speed instead of charging you a boatload of money once you pass your monthly data "limit".

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.

pay $180/month for 1gbit down/100mbit up and it is unlimited... It would be $130 for 1.75TB, but I wanted unlimited and that is an extra $50/month

I'll jump on the specs bandwagon. I really can't complain much about Spectrum or AT&T. I currently have symmetrical gigabit with no cap for $80 a month. I just signed up for "straight forward pricing" which is supposed to lock in my rate for as long as I have it.

I'm outside of Charlotte, NC.

This makes me seethe and rage and turns my piss to vinegar.

I pay 40€ /month for 20 Down & 10 Mbit/s but unlimited Traffic...

I'd be so screwed on that plan. According to my router, I've downloaded 5311 GB in the last 30 days, and uploaded 399 GB. Sure doesn't feel like it in hindsight, but some family members are on YouTube all day every day, others constantly downloading new games on Steam, and my Plex media Server and *arr apps just chews through data.

I have mediacom as well, but in a larger city of the midwest. They have datacaps here too, and i was paying about $100 for exactly this same plan up until a couple years ago. They started upgrading our speeds/caps because a new fiber company (metronet) is building in the area. Now i'm on 1 gbps down and a 4 TB cap. I still plan to switch to metronet when they finally light up my area, as its cheaper for the same speeds (plus no data caps)

Thanks god I have unlimited 150/50 4g internet at home for around 42€ per month. This month we downloaded around 5.5 TB of data. Also small town, countryside, no stop lights, no businesses other than bars and shops. There is only one stop light in whole region. And whole region is getting fiber optic. We had DSL, but speeds were terrible.

Look into fixed wireless or 4G/5G home internet. Fixed wireless is sometimes exactly what you need in spots like that. It is not 4G or 5G, sometimes it is just long range WiFi or other lax spectrum.

Wow, that's pretty terrible. I can't remember the last time I've seen data caps on home Internet (edit: there were some a while ago, but those were basically cellular-at-home for places that are hard to reach with copper or optic fibre); must've been early 2000s. Right now I get 600 Mbps d/400 Mbps u at home and 10 Mbps d/u cellular (no data cap) for a total of under 30 EUR/mo.