Edit: Also, Apples targets the premium segment of the market. Who are less likely to have such limitations.

The trend is in the other direction. AT&T now has data caps even on DSL lines. Almost all "unlimited" plans really have some limit.

And yes, for $30 you can have unlimited bandwidth. And for $30 more you can opt out of them scanning and recording your activity for ad targeting.

So now the price has literally doubled to have decent internet. How can they get away with that? Lack of competition.

And that is what this thread is really about. Until there is some competition, we won't see ubiquitous, cheap, high-speed internet.

Ouch, is that actually a thing with American ISPs these days? :(

That said I haven't asked _my_ ISP whether they do that.

Chances are the other American ISPs do it, they just burry it in the terms of service. So AT&T figured out they could make some extra cash off of their privacy conscience customers who don't know how to use VPN.

And chances are they still collect and aggregate the data, they just don't retarget you specifically.

That won't happen at the same time everywhere but where I'm from it's almost here already. Every apartment in the city either has fiber or really fast cable, it's cheap and the limitations are so high that you really have to try hard to run into them. For mobile data you can get 4G with 20+ gigs per month for less than $20.

I'm on 1 GB (3G speed) for €10, about the cheapest plan that I could find.

EDIT: And to add insult to injury, German Telekom is still connecting new buildings with 6 megabit connections or less in some places. (And I mean downtown. Some rural regions can be lucky to get 1 megabit.)

I frequently tether my MacBook Air to my phone's data connection, which is limited to 1.5GB a month (on an overage rate of 20c/MB). It would be nice if I could permanently designate my phone as a throttled connection and expect the OS and apps to respect that (even so far as having, say, Chrome limit the amount of images and Javascript it downloads from sites).

Having App Store download updates over a limited dataplan or even killing your non-perfect-signal HSDPA connection with updates is still utterly annoying.