No. Data caps (and bandwidth limits to some extent) are fundamentally broken. My water company doesn't shut off my water because I took too many long showers t

No. Data caps (and bandwidth limits to some extent) are fundamentally broken. My water company doesn't shut off my water because I took too many long showers this month. My gas company doesn't shut the valve because I had a few extra loads of laundry to run through the dryer. My electric company doesn't kill the lights because I was working on my car and used the 220V in the garage a lot this month. Instead they install a meter at the inlet, charge me for exactly what I use (and when I use it!!!) and then they can plan their capacity based around their billings. If I need more inlets (too much current at the mains breaker, not enough gas or water pressure, etc.) then they charge me a fair price for the hardware and installation and bill that new inlet in the exact same way. It's simple, transparent, and completely controllable by me. (If I don't want to rack up a larger bill this month I just close the inlet.) --- Caps and overages are a very different model: they are charging me much more than the normal cost of service once I cross some threshold or cutting off my service. That'd be like my power company saying: "you've used more than the average 901kWH, so you're going to have to pay the industrial rate on the rest of your consumption this month." More importantly, since private companies are running the show, we have no real insight into what average data consumption for the populace even looks like. You take it on their word that the plans they market align w/ the reality of average use. We can't verify that's the case because they don't legally have to publish it. Essentially these companies could be telling you "640k ought to be enough for anybody", and you're arguing that it's perfectly reasonable for them to say anyone using >640k is the top 3% and should be billed at a premium. That's not the sort of thinking that pushes the state of the art forward, in fact it's actively harmful and disincentivizes upgrades to the network. Their pricing model doesn't line up with the reality of a band-limited service, and they don't give us nearly enough information to verify their claims of what constitutes an "above average" consumer of data. --- - Wireline service should be billed as a metered utility. - Wireless service should have a fixed access fee to cover the cost of expanding the network (as well as providing E911, etc.) along with a variable access fee that is billed as a metered utility. Anything else is borderline fraud, and I'm frankly sick of having to navigate the minefield of dishonesty that is consumer-grade ISP pricing schemes.