I was in India for the last year (in the outer parts of Hyderabad), with a 50/50Mbps fibre link from a local ISP (and higher speeds were available if you wanted to pay for them, but didn’t seem worthwhile to the householders). Many sites in India and some outside would get the full speeds, but some inside and most outside would never get more than 3Mbps, with many getting substantially under 1Mbps.

After careful diagnosis (as much as you can, of such things) and checking off everything else, I inferred that the local ISP’s peering arrangements were terrible.

I was regularly uploading to YouTube while there: early on I would normally get 30–40Mbps, but at some point (maybe around September?) it dropped to ~1.4Mbps, only going up to 10 or 20 once every couple of months (and even that commonly only for ten or fifteen minutes). In February and early March it started improving again more often, but still not consistently.

(The ISP also NATted who knows how many customers across what looked to be a /24 or /25, done in such a way that I would not have a single public IP address—if I asked canhasip.com, canhazip.com, whatismyipaddress.com and a few others, they’d probably all give me different answers. And if I looked at BitTorrent downloads from the addresses, multiple full movies and such were being downloaded daily, traffic which definitely wasn’t coming from the household I was at.)

This is about the last mile. I'm pretty sure some people in the US enjoy 1Gbps internet in their homes.

Here is the global index: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index The US is definitively ahead of India in Fixed Broadband (180mbps vs 55mbps); though for a populous and developing country, India is certainly doing quite well.

But you still have data caps and that sounds quite expensive for India.

For example in Lithuania I have 1gbps with no limits for 20€.

I'm in South Africa, paying ±$73/month for 100Mbps synchronous uncapped (but with a FUP [Fair Usage Policy]). I would love to double my speed and third my costs :(

I'm in India too and I pay ~$18 for 150M/150M with a 1TB cap. To be honest I have never even been able to consume more than half of that cap, so it is almost irrelevant.

IMO data caps should be there, since if they are not there you can assume they exist but are hidden. Because per GB cost is low for ISPs, but not zero. I feel it is better that limit is made explicit and visible.

Interestingly, while there are data caps, I've never run into them and they seem to not be applied. After I use 100 GB or so they are topped up without me doing anything, so I think they are mainly for people massively abusing the connection or something.

Abuse isn't necessarily required to surpass any caps. If you have teens, they will be streaming their games and such. They can stream for hours at a time which quickly adds up. Discord video streams average about 5GB/hr. I was often passing the 1.2TB/mo cap on Comcast and had to negotiate a plan that allowed for speed and no cap. That is even before factoring in game updates which as massive these days. I was under the impression that by now games would dynamically render textures using formulas, but alas... the games are getting exponentially bigger. And gaming platforms are not optimizing downloads to share between users on a LAN, so update bandwidth usage is multiplied by number of people playing the games in the home. I share some blame on that one. Back in the day when it was just me and I played only one game, I too stayed well below any limits.

That’s because your original post says you get capped at 500GB... of course you don’t notice anything if you use just 100GB.

I meant the remaining amount is always around 500GB, it seems to reset once I reach 100GB of usage or so.

A lot of us need unlimited data so we can bittorrent our linux isos.

Just for streaming 4k video really.

I too am in India and I pay around $55 per year for 100Mbps up and down unlimited. I think that's quite good for normal activities.

the single biggest place where you want high bandwidth is while watching high def content on Netflix, and especially if different people in the household watch different stuff at the same time.