Why do cell phones have a data limit but home internet doesn’t? I understand bandwidth limits, but how can home internet get away with giving users all the data they can use, but cell phone providers can’t?
Why do cell phones have a data limit but home internet doesn’t? I understand bandwidth limits, but how can home internet get away with giving users all the data they can use, but cell phone providers can’t?
Are you sure?
There’s “hard” caps, and there’s “soft” caps. When you hit the soft caps with many of these ISP’s, they start throttling your internet usage by a substantial amount.
Relevant Screenshot of caps as of Sept 2024.
I said “home internet hasn’t had data caps for a couple of decades, well except maybe in that one country where people have no consumer rights and everyone gets fucked up the arse for money just for existing”. I’m paraphrasing here.
You said - “Oh yeah, let me prove you right!”
I’m not sure where you’re going with this
I can only speak from a UK perspective, but most home ADSL/VDSL/Fibre providers don’t have limits, other than “if your usage is tanking the network, we’ll ask you to knock it off” type clauses.
Most providers are also signed up to an agreement that if your speed drops 50% below the agreed speed on the package on average, they’ll either give you refunds, or let you out of the contract.
The only ones that throttle are the bargain basement operators aimed at people who don’t care, and one otherwise very competent provider that for some unexplainable reason only gives 1TB by default, charging an extra £10 for 10TB.
And I guess there is also a pricing step up to guaranteed bandwidth. For business use, they tend to be things like 1gbits headline, 500mbit guaranteed burst, 100mbit guaranteed sustained.
I am in the US and I do not have a hard cap, and I regularly go WELL above the soft cap listed for my ISP in that image with no throttling.