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.

  • r00ty@kbin.life
    121·
    10 months ago

    Well mobile data is very different. With fibre optic you can generally keep provisioning more cables and a single cable already carries a huge amount already.

    Radio has an absolute efficiency limit for the bandwidth of a signal and we’re pretty damn close to that now.

    5g uses wider bandwidth channels, with more cells closer together and uses things like beamforming. But there’s still always going to be an upper limit that is considerably lower than fibre.

    This is why they likely want to discourage 5g becoming a full alternative to wired, because there’s just not the capacity to do it on the same scale.