Data caps are common when there is little to no competition and ISPs feel like they can get away with it. Rare when there is competition. Even on mobile where they physically have very limited bandwidth, but when there is enough competition they can't get away charging for it and resort to things like sms warnings, throttling, fair use policies.

I live and work from home in suburban Atlanta and data caps are everywhere for the last 8 years. The options are the monopoly Cable provider (Comcast), DSL not fiber, and cellular Internet. My home has poor cell reception. When Comcast implemented the 350 GB cap, I would routinely flirt with it. Had to change my online backup habits and more. Now it is 1 TB, which is more manageable.

Also in the Atlanta area, in an area fortunate to be serviced by AT&T Fiber & Comcast's high-speed option. AT&T offers unlimited* data plans on their highest-speed plans, or as an option on other plans:

https://www.att.com/help/internet/usage.html

* - they don't say it on that page, but obviously there is some mechanism by which AT&T would stop you from using the full symmetric 1Gbps constantly.

I’m in Atlanta. Before I moved from Dekalb I had AT&T fiber symmetrical gigabit and ran 1.5 TB some months without a charge. AT&T hasn’t built out fiber where I live now but I have a Comcast 1 gigabit connection. They offer up to 2 gigabit but it expensive. Cap is 1TB but you can go over for 2 months without being charged.

Was there a cap for DSL?

I think there is always a cap in name, mine is like 1000GB per month. Though I never hit that limit anyway, so not experiencing it as well.

"Called the "Xfinity Terabyte Internet Data Usage Plan," the cap restricts the amount of data you consume in your home to 1TB per month regardless of the speed of your plan. Comcast claims 99 percent of customers use less than 1TB per month, but it does now offer an unlimited option for $50 more per month"

I have Comcast and used to pay the $50 a month for unlimited. It brought my bill $123 for internet. We don't have tv service with them. I switched to their business account that doesn't have caps and my bill dropped to $99 a month. But my download speed went from 150 to 75. But my upload went from 5 to 15. Download was never a problem but the better upload is nice.

Comcast introduced the terabyte limit a few years ago. Luckily I have RCN in my area and was immediately able to switch when they started trying to charge me.

Correct. It does make seeding a multi-TB RAID of wedding photos, home videos, etc, for online backup a slow, or expensive process.

We still have data caps in Belgium. One of the most popular ISP has lower tier internet subscriptions which have a 150GB and 200GB data cap per month.

Even though most are "unlimited" nowadays, they're still under a fair usage policy which means that if you download too much (usually 1TB+), you will get a call to explain why you download so much or you'll have your internet speed reduced.

Most major ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, Cox, Brighthouse) have a data cap in the United States, however I rarely hear of them enforcing them. They're usually 1TB with another tier for truly unlimited.

I listen to 80 something podcasts, most of which are weekly if not daily, and watch 2-3 hours of YouTube/Netflix/Hulu on Weekdays and probably 20 hours on the weekend and never come close to hitting the cap.

I've been charged multiple times by Comcast for going over. Apple TV 4K with Netflix blows through it in about two weeks with two adults that work full time and rarely stream at most a few hours a day.

Are you running any crypto seeds, torrenting, gaming, have an unsecured network, etc?

According to this article https://www.androidcentral.com/how-much-data-does-streaming-... Netflix 4k is 7.2gb an hour, if you have a 1TB Comcast cap and they're counting that as 1000gb you should be fine for at east 130 hours (giving an allowance for phone/app/os updates and random browsing).

Also, why 4k? Small room, massive display? Many people can not even detect a difference between 1080p and 4k at normal couch distance. https://www.experienceuhd.com/blog/can-human-eye-see-differe...

> Also, why 4k? Small room, massive display? Many people can not even detect a difference between 1080p and 4k at normal couch distance.

I've got a 55" 4K at a viewing distance of maybe 6', tops, if you're leaning waaaaay back on the couch, and can only barely tell the difference. A good 1080p source (high bitrate h264 or h265, or a normal ol' 1080p bluray) looks a hell of a lot better than Netflix's 4k. HDR matters a ton more than 4k itself does, as far as how good something looks.

[EDIT] and what really matters is having semi-decent speakers in a somewhat-OK 5.1 layout, with a proper receiver. I'd drop to 720p on the picture before I'd give that up.

You can get a giant 4K TV for well under $1000. All of this moaning about not being able to tell the difference between 4K needs to die.

>You can get a giant 4K TV for well under $1000.

Not sure how that is relevant to my comment, but the 2017 nominal median income per capita was $31,786 in the United States. That means even a $650 television is more than a week's gross pay for as much as 40% of the US population.

Most of us are quite content with even 720p too and just because something is 'under $1000' doesn't mean you need to replace a perfectly functional television.

The average person spends something like 35 hours a week watching TV and the average household spent $285 per month on media last year. Not spending a large amount of your income on a nice TV is kind of insane given that.

That doesn’t sound right. Two hours a day, 14 days, two adults (watching separately) is 56 hours of 4K streaming. Netflix 4K streaming is 3.5 to 7 GB per hour. So worst case for two weeks is 392GB. Now over a month, with a little extra watching on weekends, I can see how you’d blow past the cap.

Thats been my experience as well but cheap phone plans do have very limited data some only 5 to 10gb. I've seen multiple people blow all of it in less than a week on Netflix alone.

I live in a major Canadian city it’s still somewhat common to see, though usually more for budget brands. Packages usually are capped at 200 GB and the next tier will be unlimited.

I’d say the shift to more unlimited offerings happened about 5 years ago.

In Canada?

My local cable internet ISP:

https://www.cogeco.ca/en/internet/packages

The packages under $100CAD/mo have data caps under 200GB.

It is very common in Sri Lanka, all home(cable, 4G, fiber) and mobile plans have them. Speeds are between 10-40mbps

Currently using a 33GB Daytime + 33GB Nighttime plan(Total 66GB month) for $9.5

On a consumer, not high-tier plan? It's a standard in close to every country. Where is that not the case? (I assume cable here as "any non mobile" rather than actual cable tv internet provider)

You can find a non-capped (at least in theory) plan everywhere if you pay enough of course.

I cannot find a single capped broadband package here in Ireland (only mobile or satellite has a cap). I've also travelled throughout the EU and have not encountered anyone with a broadband data cap. You can get consumer 1 gbps for 25-55€/month in many towns in Ireland, at that point there's hardly any need for differentiating between high and low tier.

In EU (the Netherlands) you can get 4G unlimited for phone for about 20$. I live with my friend hosts his own server for backups and home cinema.

For movies/tv shows/games we probably spend few TB a month.

I had never heard about such thing until now, it's ridiculous to have cap and I'm so glad that I don't have to live in such a place.

It is actually unlimited? Several companies in the United States offer "unlimited data" but throttle speeds after you use 50 GB~ so much that it is basically unusable.

Unlimited has to be unlimited by law. After 10gb of usage a day, you need to text a number (for free) to get a few more gb, and so on. That's just there to prevent flooding the network too much.

From what I have heard it depends on the mobile provider. Some have daily limit around 10+ GB. But that seems quite reasonable. I have monthly 10GB 4G for my phone and I have never hit it. I've heard stories after a screw up the mobile provider gave unlimited 4G for a year and the guy used it as his internet at his home.

I think in Europe there are caps for the lower tiers in the UK and Germany, but definitely those are the exception.

Did not have them in czech republic (used 2 different providers) or UK (3 providers)

In France, there are caps on the speed but not on the amount of data.

a cap on speed translates to a data cap per month. could you give an example of say your speed cap?

lets say a month is 30 days, a day 24 hours, an hour 3600 seconds, then a month is 2.592 Ms.

so an "unlimited" plan at say 1Gbps is actually always upper limited at 2592 Tb (bit) per month or 324 TB (byte) per month

I think governments should ban the "unlimited" names and force the ISP's to simply state actual limits or variable limit calculations if dependent on congestion. Here in belgium we have instead some vague "reasonable usage" policy...

> a cap on speed translates to a data cap per month

There's one fundamental difference: there's no risk of exceeding that implied "data cap" derived from the speed cap.

as if risk is a desirable trait for contracts and agreements?

None of the major ISPs in Switzerland have data caps, I have 1Gbps for 65$/month.

I've never had a capped plan in several different countries.

I traveled 2 times in US and didn't heard such thing. Also never seen this in any of the dozen country i travelled to.