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.
And France gets 5Gbps for €30 per month or 8Gbps for €40 per month. I’m in the US now and really miss free.fr as my ISP
I know right! Free.fr was a real disruptor. They fought the government to open telecom to private companies (it used to be France Telecom only which is gov owned) then they worked with the gov to create a fiber network that can be used my multiple ISP. So no running parallel lines from separate companies, they all create, maintain and share the same network all over the country. Before that, they started as the first free dialup internet service. You would call a number, and connect. You were paying with ads. They also were the first DSL speed, first TV over DSL, first FTTH, first VoIP, and they also have a cell phone network. And the prices are forcing all the other companies to align. We seriously need free.for in the US.
What average consumer has hardware that’s actually capable of using more than 1Gbps?
Average none, though 2.5 Gbps is getting more and more common and WiFi is catching up too. You could max out multiple slower devices at the same time without hitting the limit of your uplink. I don’t have a use case for that, so I’d only upgrade from my current 1 Gbps to higher speeds if the price is comparable. That doesn’t mean that others don’t have a use case for it.
Most decent to higher end desktops have at least 2.5 Gbps. Even a laptop/desktop that doesn’t can get a 2.5 Gbps usb-c to ethernet dongle for like $30-$40.
Higher end access points also have 2.5 Gbps. I have no issue maxing out my 1.5 Gbps (ISP over provisions the lines so I get 1.7 gbps) on Steam. Also keep in mind that when you have a faster connection with multiple devices/people, each device/person might be able to pull 1 Gbps. As in if you have 2 Gbps internet service even 2 older computers that only have a gigabit internet connection, each could get the full gigabit to them.
If you’re the type of person that only uses wifi, you won’t see a difference between gigabit and multigigabit connections but plenty of people have ethernet throughout their homes and they make use of faster than gigabit connections.
