I thought data caps for home internet were a thing of the past…

I’ve somewhat recently moved back to a very rural area of the Midwest. Small town. No stop lights. Biggest businesses other than the bars are Casey’s, Subway, and Dollar General.

And we have one ISP (not counting DSL) — Mediacom. When we first signed up, I had to go with the second service tier. But not because of speeds, but so I could have a reasonable 1 TB/mo data cap.

Lucky me, they increased the cap to 1.5 TB. 🙄

I hope that in my lifetime I can see ISPs regulated as a public utility.

  • Anamana@feddit.deEnglish
    5·
    11 months ago

    No Datacaps for landline in Europe yeah… In many EU countries you can also buy a mobile flat without caps for like 40€.

    The US just doesn’t have a good consumer lobby.

    • Efwis@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      The problem with the US is even if we had a consumer lobby, which I don’t think we do, we would be overrun by the big corporate lobbies in a matter of seconds.

      The only people that get listened to by our government are those who have the big money to control members of congress. We are supposed to have a government for the people by the people but instead we have a government for the rich by the rich.

      Those of us that don’t have billions of dollars don’t have a voice, even though they claim to listen, they don’t unless you can line their pockets with a few $100,000 thousand dollars a month.

      Our government official don’t care about us, they care about money and how to get more of it.

    • Tetsuo@jlai.luEnglish
      12·
      11 months ago

      Sorry if this is nitpicking but as far as I know, there is no such thing as unlimited mobile data plans.

      In most contracts they will say that you have to use reasonably the data plan and you cannot for example constantly max out your connection. Like 24/7 constant max bandwidth used.

      In most case it doesn’t really matter but I really don’t like the fact that ISPs get to say it’s unlimited when it definitely isn’t.

      It’s unlimited*

      • Some restrictions may apply.
      • Anamana@feddit.deEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        I don’t know where you live, but here in Austria you can get truly unlimited ones. People also use them instead of landline connections without any issues.

        • cmeerw@programming.devEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          And depending where you live that might or might not work out well for you. If too many people in your neighbourhood use too much mobile data at the same time as you, speeds will decrease and unlimited data plans in particular will be throttled.

          • Anamana@feddit.deEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            Never got into it that deep myself, I just know other people who never had issues. Prime-time streaming in full hd etc.

            But I’m also pretty sure you can sue them, if they can’t keep up the advertised speeds over longer time. Obv only when the infrastructure is actually available.

            • cmeerw@programming.devEnglish
              1·
              11 months ago

              You can sue anyone for anything, but no one is advertising any guaranteed speeds for mobile broadband, so your chances will be fairly limited. Best you can do is withdrawing from your contract.

              • Anamana@feddit.deEnglish
                1·
                11 months ago

                For unlimited data contracts you can usually pay different amounts for different speeds. They actively advertise with those maximum speeds and if you can never reach them, even tho they are available at your location, you can report them to a federal agency and take legally warranty claims.