greed. some home internet services are also capped too for the exact same reason.
What you're up against:
Home internet providers have high-speed lines that run through population centers and into every neighborhood. The backbones are fiber, so adding more capacity isn't all that expensive. If they run a 2.5-gigabit line to your neighborhood and it gets stressed, they can upgrade the local aggregate. Wired internet has enough bandwidth to service an incredible number of people.
Wireless internet needs towers and faces challenges like exposure, interference, and balancing power so everyone doesn’t try to reach the wrong tower. Each tower has to have it's own network backhaul to service everyone in that area. Each tower has limited bandwidth and time to slice up the connections. It's hard and expensive to expand cellular tech.
Data caps let IPS's handle capacity planning. Charging more for overages makes money and dissuades users from making them upgrade prematurely.
I pay an extra $30/mo on top of the $100/mo for comcast to not charge me extra when we shatter 1TB usage every single month (average 3.5-4TB usage in this home). They absolutely do have caps on home internet, always have, at least in my state. During the pandemic they relaxed the fees so going over didn’t cost but as soon as they could, they went right back to charging $10 per 50gb over 1TB usage with a max fee of $100. It’s bullshit but we don’t have a choice here, can’t even get satellite internet as an option because the complex doesn’t allow dish installation on the building.
Mine Internet at 500gb, but it's only an extra $10 for unlimited data. My cell data is unlimited but I know they throttle speed after a certain amount. At least I don't get charged extra.
Home internet had data limits too. In fact, you originally paid by the minute of usage through your telephone line before flat rates became a thing, blocking all calls in the process. Back in the day we'd use various time limited free trials by AOL and other ISPs to browse (Freenet was a very big one here in Germany), which they kinda threw out battling each other for customers. Look up AOL free trial CDs for example.
Some home Internet plans do. I’ve seen AT&T had in their terms that if you hit 99GB, they would throttle your speeds.
This was years ago, so not sure if that changed or not.
Satellite plans often had limits too because they didn’t want to encourage lots of usage on their satellites. I haven’t checked in a few years, but last I checked, these weren’t throttle limits either, sometimes they had hard limits where you just couldn’t connect anymore once you hit the limit.
Home internet did happen to have a limit in most places prior to the pandemic (at least in California). It was one of the big quiet changes that occurred. For example, ATT used to have 150GB limit about 5 years ago but it kept getting bumped up.
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