Playing devil's advocate here. A possibly legitimate reason ISPs put in data caps is wireless spectrum congestion.
Playing devil’s accountant here. A possibly legitimate reason ISPs put in data caps are shareholder dividends and capital appreciation.
It's a self managed QOS. If the customer knows they can only use X data they're going to be a bit more cautious about using it. Vs if they have unlimited data then they'll just download that 50 gig file on their phone because "fuck it why not". The less data each individual customer uses the less infrastructure they have to build, and the faster/more consistent their existing stuff will be.
Cell tower time is a LOT more expensive than time on a fiber optic cable. Your ISP installs a few boxes to serve your neighborhood, a cell carriers tower might go 20 miles.
They do have unlimited data plans here and it's at same price as your average wifi plan.
My cell provider Telia gives me unlimited internet and calls in all nordic countries, pretty sweet deal as I need to use my phone in more than one of them.
AOL used to be $19.95/mo for forty hours, then an additional charge per minute beyond that.
Oh god, taking me back to their stupid always-on-top timer on the screen. It was anxiety inducing. I'm so glad pay by the minute internet didn't last, can you imagine??
I can. My phone bills were over $400 for a while in the early 90s. $400 in 1994 is worth over $850 today.
My Comcast has a terabyte monthly data cap. They will send you an email if you get close to it, and if memory serves they allow you one time to go over it before they charge you some.
Even with downloading many big games sometimes when I refresh my PC and using streaming video apps all the time, I've never hit it but have come close several times. I also work from home.
Neither of those statements is universally true. It is a tendency, but not a universal rule.
Mobile internet is newer, less essential to many people, and I think mostly more costly to operate for the ISP per amount of data transferred, so this is why it tends to be the case. But there are unlimited mobile plans and limited home plans too in the world.
I guess it depends what country you're in. I don't have limits on either and don't want to imagine having that concern.
The first time I saw a mobile plan without any limits was somewhere around 2003-2004. Pretty soon after that, all the competitors started offering similar plans. So glad we got rid of those stupid limits.
I am lucky to have a local ISP that is amazing. I'm hoping that they never change.
It is a proxy for don't use too much on the busy towers. In small towns it doesn't matter, but if you are in a downtown the tower will have many people connecting to it and the radio frequencies are shared. By putting a limit on everyone they force better sharing of that limited bandwidth. The limit is very large - far more that than the large abusers will use alone, but in a dense areas it is less than the common person will use all at once.
Tmoblie has (or had?) a binge on plan - if you used video (which we quickly figured out meant low quality - but probably good enough for a tiny phone screen) or audio you were using a lot of data, but it was consistent all day and so they didn't have to count it - if the tower doesn't have enough bandwidth for everyone on the first day of the month they have to fix that. That is the real worry: the tower running out of bandwidth on the first day of the month.
It depends where you live, Here pay $45usd for unlimited 1Gb/500Mbps Fibre and it is truly unlimited (usually 15-20Tb a month) and $35usd for unlimited 5G tho it's throttled abit after 60Gb.
Home internet usually does, it’s just pretty high.
Neither my phone internet nor my home internet has a GB limit. The phone internet costs 25€ a month, and home internet 30€.
They convinced the FCC, cellular networks are different than wired, and should have different rules.
My previous home line had a hard cap at 1TB per month. That seemed like a lot at the time, but I think as the internet grows and requires more bandwidth these "sky high" caps will feel smaller and smaller.
Limits on home service used to be more common, but some plans still have caps. My home internet has a cap, it is just really, really high and they charge you more for exceeding it instead of cutting off access.
My phone also has a cap, but the cap means the connection is throttled instead of charging more.
I have had a home plan in the past woth no limit, but they didn't offer service to my new house when I moved.
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