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.

  • Dettweiler@lemmyonline.comEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    Home internet data caps WERE a thing of the past when Obama appointed Tom Wheeler as FCC chairman, who then pushed rulings to classify ISPs as a public utility and started enforcing net neutrality. Companies that didn’t play ball started getting fined until they fell in line. Being a former executive for a major ISP, he was very familiar with the anti-competitive practices and underhanded tricks those companies had been using for years; and he used those practices against them to finally make some pro-consumer progress for internet access in the US.

    Then, Trump came in and put Ajit Pai in charge of the FCC (no joke, my phone kept auto correcting his name to Shit Pie). Anyways, Shit Pie tore down those rulings and undid all those years of progress as part of the Trump administration’s anti-Obama initiative. Even though it was proven time and again that what he did was directly against public opinion, and that ISPs were flooding the public commentary with bot posts(some even made by dead people); Shit Pie continued to meme about himself and drink from an obnoxiously large Reese’s coffee mug while doing so. At this point, every provider of internet services has added back data caps in the US, and they have continued to increase their prices to maintain that 99.9% profit margin. They’ve also locked down more areas to prevent municipal broadband services from forming, and they’re even pushing for legislation to prevent them from ever happening.

    The current administration has done absolutely nothing. In fact, they’ve been so unremarkable, I have no idea who is in charge of the FCC, and I don’t feel like looking it up.

  • Remmy@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    I am very thankful that I do not live in the United States. Even in Canada where telecommunications services are notoriously expensive, data caps on cellphone plans are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Carriers like Freedom Mobile will simply throttle your speed instead of charging you a boatload of money once you pass your monthly data “limit”.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    AP WiFi Access Point
    DNS Domain Name Service/System
    IP Internet Protocol
    IoT Internet of Things for device controllers
    Plex Brand of media server package
    VPN Virtual Private Network

    6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

    [Thread #68 for this sub, first seen 19th Aug 2023, 15:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • Baku@aussie.zoneEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Looking at all you guys with your gigabit connections, meanwhile I’m in Aus and lucky to get 30 down and 15 up

  • Ryan@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    In Thailand I’m getting 400Mbps upload and download with unlimited data.

    It costs about 300฿/mo ≈ $8.7/mo

      • Ryan@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Although I agree that people get paid less here, I highly doubt that it costs an ISP in the US 8x more to transfer data than an ISP in Thailand.

        I’m not really trying to argue that Thai internet is cheap, it’s that internet elsewhere is exorbitantly expensive.

  • dan@upvote.au
    0·
    1 year ago

    I get unlimited 10Gbps symmetric fiber for $40/month. One of the only affordable things in the San Francisco Bay Area, lol