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.

  • @kristoff@infosec.pub
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    82 years ago

    just out of interest … somebody here on satellite? I am interested to know the prices for sat services out there?

  • @mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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    12 years ago

    Casey’s

    you’re in the sticks when your quicky-mart 7/11 option is Casey’s lol. Missouri?

    If it’s any slight consolation, I pay ridiculous prices for comcast 100mb in Seattle, and my only other option is shitty adsl that’s even worse garbage.

  • @Stuka@lemmy.ml
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    2 years ago

    I pay $50 / mo for 100 down, 5 up 1.25tb cap. I feel ya. It’s another $50 just for no cap.

  • Retro
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    312 years ago

    Yeah, the ISP cartels sucks. I’ve been stuck paying $170/mo for uncapped 1000/35mbps connection.

    Thankfully, before the end of the year, a local ISP is moving into my area. They offer uncapped symmetrical gigabit, for $75/mo… I’ll be saving $95/mo for BETTER service.

    The longstanding ISP cartels should seriously be punished for the abuse of their market positions and failure to appropriately use government funding they’ve been given.

      • @Hexarei@programming.dev
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        22 years ago

        Yeah that’s abysmal, but it’s a result of the fact that docsis has always been an asymmetrical standard in which upload speeds are lower than download. I recently moved house and my old ISP was fiber to prem, we had symmetrical gigabit. New house is cable ISP that only offers 1000/50… While docsis 3.0 supports up to 200mbps up. Bunch of greedy bastards.

    • @BluePhoenix01@sh.itjust.works
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      22 years ago

      Same boat here… and then the “default cap” is nothing. Between work and family, we hit the data cap of 1.25TB within three weeks.

      Any place I can find more info about the “end of the year” timeframe you mentioned? A new ISP is also rolling in my area, but their site has been vague on time.

      The main street into our house currently has it available, but our actual address not yet… driving me a little crazy.

      Hope the new one is available for you soon.

  • @jengus@lemm.ee
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    92 years ago

    Our local fiber (1000/1000) is truly unlimited and just had a price decrease from $120 to $100. Never had an ISP do that before!

  • @LrdThndr@lemmy.world
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    22 years ago

    I’m paying $115/mo for 1G down 30M up, no data cap.

    I WAS paying $150 for the same until I called and bitched that new subscribers were getting the same for $89. So, still getting fucked, but at least they’re using lube now.

    There’s fiber literally on the next street over from me. Come the fuck on guys - fiber in my neighborhood. Let’s fucking gooooooooooo already. You’ve been teasing me for years. Quit pulling my hair and fuck me already damn.

  • @Manzabar@lemmy.world
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    52 years ago

    No fiber available to my house, so I’m stuck with paying ~$85 for 50/2. Or switching ISPs and briefly getting a chair rate for faster speeds, but adding in a data cap and less reliability.

  • @DRx@lemmy.world
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    22 years ago

    pay $180/month for 1gbit down/100mbit up and it is unlimited… It would be $130 for 1.75TB, but I wanted unlimited and that is an extra $50/month

    • kaupas24
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      12 years ago

      Sorry for bumping this, but why do you have such a big difference in upload and download speeds? Here in Norway the difference is 1-2 mbps. Why 900mbps?

      • @DRx@lemmy.world
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        32 years ago

        So unless you live in an area with fiber, asymmetrical speeds are pretty typical… I’m not sure if it is because it’s all coax so there are infrastructure limitations? But it’s actually gotten faster because 6 months ago my upload was only 30 mbit/s.

        Once fiber is in my area I’ll switch to that, but symmetrical will add more cost…but of course it will lol

  • @Water1053@lemmy.world
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    22 years ago

    I’ll jump on the specs bandwagon. I really can’t complain much about Spectrum or AT&T. I currently have symmetrical gigabit with no cap for $80 a month. I just signed up for “straight forward pricing” which is supposed to lock in my rate for as long as I have it.

    I’m outside of Charlotte, NC.

    • TheDaveAbides
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      22 years ago

      How many ISP choices do you have?

      I’m outside of Milwaukee. Was paying Spectrum $75 for 300/20 (I think), no cap. Only other option is DSL. They finally buried fiber in the back yard earlier this summer, but haven’t turned it on yet. Got a great deal for T-mobile home internet, $25 for about 300/75, no cap.

      • @Water1053@lemmy.world
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        12 years ago

        Just checked on the FCC Broadband Map, and I saw options for AT&T (symmetrical gigabit), Spectrum (1000, 35 wtf), HughesNet (25,3), Starlink (50,10), Verizon (300,10) and I think T-Mobile even though they weren’t listed.

  • @iegod@lemm.ee
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    12 years ago

    I forget how lucky I am to live in a large city sometimes. 2Gb down, 1gbps up, $50 all in.

  • @kite@lemmy.world
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    112 years ago

    OP, check out the websites about grants ISPs are getting to put fiber in rural areas and see if your area is on the list somewhere (I would try and link you to some, but I’m on mobile and for some reason I have a hell of a time finding those sites while on mobile). You can see below what I’ve had to deal with for about 20 years, until my area finally got covered by one of those grants a few months ago. I am super rural - like, I am literally surrounded by nationally protected forest and nothing else; it’snot a place I thought would ever be included in those grant locations. It was, though, and I now have Gigabyte internet with no cap, with VOIP, for $74.98 a month. If I’m not using WiFi, I get an actual gig of download speed. If I’m on wifi, it’s usually between 600-900MB.

    Up until recently, we paid Centurylink about $150 a month for two lines into the house. Each line maxed out at 0.75MB download speed and 0.23 MB upload speed. We needed two lines to even be able to function. Almost 20 years of this, with no other options besides Hughesnet. We tried them for a little while; their equipment cost a fortune, it was about$150 a month, the speed was nearly as bad and they had a 200MB A MONTH CAP. We had to turn off images for websites in order to not go over the cap. Previous to 2004, I lived in a very rural part of NY. We had high speed internet for $69 a month, no cap. I can’t remember the speed, but I remember that it took 3 minutes to download a full sized movie. 20 YEARS AGO the internet was better, and cheaper!

    • mosiacmango
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      2 years ago

      This comes off as flippant, but it’s viable at least on a small scale as a WISP. Point to point wifi has become both good and cheap, with a pair of devices from companies like tplink or ubiquiti running around $200.

      You can “shoot” wifi over air for miles now with near pinpoint accuracy. If your area has a tall landmark(water tower, grain elevator, etc) or is willing to let you put up a tower, you can trench line to just that location and load it up with WAPS to shoot wifi to customers in the surrounding area. You can also often use this customers as repeaters to widen the coversge.

      For a real life example, some folk living in the islands off the coast of Washington started their own from scratch.

      • @uis@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        Also theoretically you can co-pay with your neighbour. Both of you are unlikely to utilize full channel at the same time anyway.

        • mosiacmango
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          2 years ago

          Ideally, you would want to find 50-100 neighbors, or whatever your bandwidth/range could handle. Take a $1000 deposit or whatever seems sane to cover initial costs, giving them their first “X” months free. Maintain the system for that time period, then you are generating a profit and providing much better service.

  • Xusontha
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    152 years ago

    Where I am, there was only one provider of internet for a long time, and I was paying for a plan that’s more or less what you have right now. Then another company came in and laid fiber, and both companies slashed prices and now I get over double my download speed, no data cap, and something crazy like 50x the old upload speed all for like 20 dollars less a month! Before I switched to the fiber company, the first company even increased my download speeds without increasing the price! Anyone who says competition doesn’t change things is crazy.